Friday Night Jam

Always a pleasure to present a new song. This one is another from Musicians Collaboration, where I co-wrote and put together El Dorado.

It's more of a musician site than a songwriter site -- it's for people to have a garage band when they're hundreds of miles away. The musicianship and technical expertise in mixing and mastering is enviable.

I was handed a base track with this retro rocking tune, which sounds like every cover band you've ever heard (though this is an original). Very fun stuff. The chorus was written ("Yeah you got what you need (x3)/And you don't need me") and Nick wanted me to write a lyric -- to this music -- about a guy hitting on a girl way out of her league.

I had fun writing this one. Hope you have fun listening to "What You Need."

Radio Free Nashville

There were a lot of components to my trip to Nashville last week. I wanted to try to meet some strong country co-writers and hopefully pitch a professional demo of “Crossing the Threshold.” I would up doing some good writing with people I already knew from Just Plain Folks and the Muses’ Muse, as well as my friend Jen Foster. And I had a good mentoring session at NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association).

I criss-crossed paths with Coles Whalen, getting to see her perform twice (but not getting much of a chance to talk), and go to a couple of the better “see new writers” spots, like the Commodore Grill and the Blue Bar. (Coles continues to impress, and got to open for Pat Benatar this summer; her new CD, “The Whistle Stop Road Record” is out, as is Jen Foster’s “Thirty-Nine”)

I did meet up with Wendy Vickers, one of the songwriting community’s most active boosters. A Minneapolis transplant, she moved to Nashville and is almost always seen at writers nights at the Commodore and other places. I had a chance to have coffee with her during my visit, and she gave me background on Radio Free Nashville.

RFN is just about to move to 107.1 on the dial, so as I post this, it’s actually off the air for the transition. It’s a more left-leaning voice in the right-leaning Nashville community – an alternative voice for political discussion, and a celebration of the wide-ranging songwriters’ community. Wendy hosts a weekly show on Sunday morning called “Never Too Old” which features the music of the Baby Boomer generation.

Wendy’s MySpace spotlights a songwriter each week, and I was honored to be last week’s designee – Thanks, Wendy!

The trip ended with writing a song, literally on my way to the airport. I had brunch at the justly famous Noshville (a New York deli in the center of barbecue country – very good but they had no idea what a “corned beef special” was). I left Jen with a handful of lyrics I thought she would do well on, and she buzzed me as I approached the airport, with melodic ideas and suggestions for lyric cuts and changes. My trip conclued with me on my laptop and cell phone at the airport, writing a song with Jen. A fitting farewell (for now) to Music City.

Man With No Blog

It's simply an outrage that my blog has lain untended for over two months. But I got involved with a performance project (just acting, no musical involvement) and it took over for a while. I will post more details at a later time, as I think it's a timely topic for musicians as well (travel, perform, travel, exhaustion, no energy or time to write).

But my performance duties culminated last Friday night at a cabaret, a fundraiser to benefit the Polycystic Kidney Disease Foundation (PKD). This disease affects members of my family and we do several events every year, including this cabaret.

Last year, I performed the Rumplestiltzkin song, but this year I managed to get a few songs that were cabaret-worthy, and get some extremely talented people to sing them. There were four in total but I have audio right now for two of them. We had video camera malfunctions and I resorted to my trusty digital voice recorder to capture these two. So the quality is just middling, but the performances were worth capturing.

Carlo Pocklington, who wrote "Yearbook," came up with a wonderful setting for "Man With No Name," a rat pack sort of bar song, and the extremely talented Joe Southard picked up a martini glass and sang it. You can read the (revised) lyrics while you listen.

I was also delighted to have recording artist Liz Seymour on hand, to sing a new song by Eduard Glumov and myself. This fun lyric, "Just a Cup of Coffee," has been sitting in my folders for a while with a very cool pop/jazz setting in an unfinished demo by Eduard. But I knew the song would work not only as a studio recording, but in a simplified jazz/cabaret setting as well.

Both songs feature arrangements and piano by John Waldie, with bass by Paul Graefe.

I'm grateful to both composers for making these songs happen, and to the performers and musicians for letting me hear them live.

Catalog Expansion

It's been way too long since I posted any new songs. Part of that is I'm doing a lot of work on spec and behind the scenes. I'm doing less writing "just because" and more writing with artists, both local and travelling, as well as a little overseas. Much of this work is on spec -- it may or may not ultimately be used, and even the work that is being used either isn't recorded yet, or isn't releasable yet. So there's a lot of material you won't hear/see for a while, and some you'll just never see.

So it's really nice to be able to put up three new songs today. Ian Ferrin every so often gives me something he'd like to work on. In one case I had a toss-off lyric that he liked and wanted to move forward on, in another he had an orphan melody (a melody written for another lyric that wasn't going to be used) and asked me to retrofit some words. Both recordings are in the pretty-close-to-done phase, so they're ready for posting.

Both of Ian's songs are contempoary pop love ballads. We've started to build up a catalog of this sort of material, so if we ever get some attention for one of these songs, whoever sings it will probably have some interest in other songs we've written. Today's new "old-fashioned" ballads are:

"Learning As I Go" (Ian Ferrin/Z. Mulls)

"Same Old Long Song" (Ian Ferrin/Z. Mulls)


Also, I have a new collaborator, Carlo Pocklington. Carlo lives in Paraguay and found my website, and in particular was looking at one particular lyric, "Yearbook," about a woman going through her high school yearbook and reminiscing about boys with whom she interacted. This has been a personal favorite and it took some time for Carlo to convince me to give him a chance with it. I'm glad I did, as it is a song suitable for cabaret singing, and it gave me an opportunity to fix several clumsy lyrics. And it's done with an appropriate female vocal. Please enjoy:

"Yearbook" (Carlo Pocklington/Z. Mulls)

Twice in One Week

I don’t get out as much as I’d like. The vagaries of life, responsibilities and the growing exigencies of sloth all keep me from seeing the acts I’d like and going to the gigs I’d like whenever I’d like.

So it was a rare delight to see the same performer twice in one week. On July 17, I was up on the Lower East Side to see Seth Glier, both to enjoy his performance and to hang out. He was playing at Rockwood Music Hall, also a favorite destination.

It’s easy to see where Rockwood gets its name. The walls are roughhewn stone, mainly brick and concrete, leftover from what looks like earlier construction. There are interior brick windows in which massive amounts of candle wax have melted. The ceiling is made up of what looks like original beams, great long pieces of wood with a great deal of character. Walls and ceiling. Rock. Wood.

(That would be a great explanation, but actually the venue is run by Ken Rockwood, a performer in his own right as half of Professor and Maryann. The rock and the wood are coincidental Probably.)

But later on the bill was a young lady named ambeR rubarth (not a misprint). I listened to some of her songs and was quite taken, so I came back after Seth’s set, and we watched her together.

The small nuggets of bio you can glean from any cursory reading about her tell you that she was working with a sculptress when she realized she really wanted to be a musician. And she learned the guitar and applied herself with a single-minded purpose. She has been traveling and playing and learning all about finding her way in the music business.

And she lights up the stage. She is enormously appealing, with the kind of smile you find you are always looking for. A good voice, charming songs, both whimsical and quirky, and a good sense of herself on stage. One song in particular, “You Will Love This Song” is a lovely piece of circular self-referentialism about a break-up and songwriting about a break-up, and songwriting as well.

We spoke briefly afterwards and she told me she was playing in Philly the next Friday (which was, conincidentally, my birthday) as half of a duo called The Paper Raincoat (with Alex Wong, of Vienna Teng). This cycle of songs is based on a plot that they aren’t telling you, something about life in Brooklyn. You can enjoy them as songs but there is a stylistic and emotional through-line to them,. The melodies are much more driven, focused, and pop-laden. Alex is the centrifugal force, and ambeR is the lilting engine. Along with their jobbed in drummer, they kept their set engaged and engaging.

Both ambeR and The Paper Raincoat are about to release new CDs. Mark your calendars.

The Guitar Whisperer

I am very late in reporting in on a wonderful music showcase I saw a few weeks ago at the Tin Angel. I’d like to give a full rundown of each act, but I’m afraid I have to give short shrift to most of them.

I can only mention in passing Karen and Amy Jones, a sister-folksinger act with opera-trained voices, whom I’ve seen a few times (and rumor has it, are gradually percolating a song with me). And I have to leave you with scant impressions of the local Americana artist Lee Morgan, with whom I spent a few hours on my birthday last year as he performed at Lickety Split. Lee’s harmonica work and soulful vocals are worth experiencing, even for those who don’t usually take to the “Americana” sound.

I’ll briefly mention Kursten Bouton, a soulful singer songwriter who straddles that difficult chasm between bright and moody, and has a new CD you should preview at her MySpace.

And I’d like to spend more time looking into David W, a music promoter who put the evening of ‘emerging artists” together. David has been on the Philly music scene for many years; he’s visually impaired but his ears are preternaturally alert. I had noticed all the acts above before, and had mentally noted that they had something special going on, but David is the one who not only noticed, but found a way to bring them all together and cross-pollinate their audience.

No, the person who not only delighted but floored me was Christie Lenée, who was the only act I hadn’t seen before.

She was a Guitar Whisperer. She knew things about the instrument deep in her bones, deep in her soul. She made it sing, she made it dance and she made it sit up and beg. Most guitarists have a few favorite positions to hold it – adjusting it slightly when there’s a difficult reach. But Christie played it in several ways, crouching, sitting, holding it on her lap.

Philly is a great, great music town. It doesn’t take much to realize that, from the long list of music venues, from NJ to the western suburbs, to just stopping in and hearing what’s going on. You see a lot of talent --- the baseline is pretty high. And you learn to expect and demand a level of excellence

But during one of Christie’s guitar solos (one of two extended ones in her set) incredulity began to set in. jaw slowly, so slowly dropping, until I frantically had to text a friend (the first time I have ever texted mid-act, to say Holy #%^ could this girl play.

Christie, while performing on her own, has just taken up the lead guitar position in my friend AlyCat’s band, and watching them together – Aly on the bass, Christie on the guitar, with their blended voices – is a treat. Search them out when they’re playing (and listen for the song “Officially” which I co-wrote with Aly).

Truly. She loves that guitar, and it loves her back.

Seth's Sojourn

There’s a short anecdote I won’t tell about Seth Glier (rhymes with HERE, not HIGHER), but suffice to say we did get in to take a look around The Living Room space while others were across Ludlow street waiting for their crepes.

Seth is younger than he’d like to be at the moment, but time will take care of that soon enough, as it does for all of us. And time will only let this talented singer/songwriter develop his considerable skills and allow him to outpace his current self. There are impressive and amazing things to come – but you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s been playing the piano in coffeehouses and bars for over 20 years straight, to get to the level of sophistication he’s at.

Seth Glier is mainly a piano man, and you will hear hints of Billy Joel in some of his more muscularly-arranged songs. You’ll also hear traces of Diana Krall, when he lays down a few quiet jazz chords as some songs get underway. Live, you’ll see him reach for the keys with a passion and a fervor one usually reserves for lovers. And there's that lovely tenor voice, high and pure enough to not sound false when he moves into falsetto.

He will pull out a guitar from time to time, as in “Someone Else To Crown” on the new CD, The Trouble With People (“The trouble with people is they drive me nuts/Feet on the gas and hands on the clutch/But nobody knows how to take the wheel/The mind has forgotten what the heart can feel”). This is his third full CD (plus an EP called “Sojourn”).

The newer songs have more production going on – like on “Naia” which is engineered to sound like vinyl (the singer singing how he is standing by the stereo to make sure the right song is playing when “you arrive”).

Some nice turns of phrase as well --- “She’s a warm sensation/Like a Mexico vacation”

Seth is often joined by guitarist Ryan Hommel, his friend and side man. Ryan “sides” with other people, and has some sweetly laid-back solo tracks on his MySpace. He has a couple of Seth's songs as well, as Ryan acted as producer and arranger in addition to playing guitar, bass and other instruments (so while it's Seth singing and playing in the foreground, you can hear Ryan's work all over the place).

You may have read about Seth recently – his home-state paper, the Boston Globe (he’s from Western MA) had an article about how he financed much of his tour through fan donations. This is in keeping with artists having to do much more fan interaction in this MySpace age of ten thousand artists.

You may have missed him this time around. He’s come to the end of a US tour, and is now going to do mostly New England dates for the Spring, and he’s off to the UK in the Summer. I’d keep an eye out for the fall when he starts to get to the rest of the US again.

For now, you can hit his website and his MySpace (as well as Ryan’s) and make yourself acquainted. Next year, you might even be able to buy him a drink.