So many times I have thought in my life, I should just stay home. I was too afraid to step outside and fail. But I always forced myself to jump. I knew that not going down that road would be as painful as possible disappointment at the end of it. The one thing that helped me every time, was the simple fact that I knew what was at home. I had no clue what was in front of me if I actually took that step. But, each step, I was armed with my hopes and dreams. Of course there are consequences. When you take a step in the direction of a dream, you make an action. Every action has a reaction. It is simple laws of physics. Consequences and Dreams are the yin and yang of life. The natural flow of things is just that, a flowing stream. If we make waves, then of course nature will want to straighten things out.
Every pencil was born to write, but does every pencil write a masterpiece? Everyone has the potential to strive for something better, to reach for that dream. With each step though, it is a constant checks and balance between what consequences you must face before going forward and if the dream is worth more than that. “Who will I leave behind, what will I lose, how will I know what to do, Is this the right thing to do?” These are all types of questions we must ask when we are going against the grain.
This realization I have on my path has became apparent so many times through my experiences. One very powerful moment came to me while embarking on my first little tour I did out east. I was booked to play at Singer/Songwriter festival in New Jersey. I made the long journey, fighting off a fever and missing the people back at home. While I sat there in the hotel room, I remember thinking how horrible I felt and felt loneliness creeping in. I looked at my guitar, said “F*#k it”, and went to play the show. That night, I became friends with some really great people and really amazing musicians. I learned a lot just by talking with them and hearing their experiences. Winding the night down at a little inn on the coast of Cape May, New Jersey, each of us grabbed a guitar and out came an impromptu jam of an amazing version of Glen Hansard’s Falling Slowly. At that moment, I felt it. That tingling feeling when you know, you know everything is right.
Music has always been my dream. It is what I look for in every direction. When I face those tough decisions, I listen to this song. I wrote it as a message to myself to hold on to what I want to be. Every time I play one of my own songs that I wrote, I feel I have succeeded in accomplishing that dream. I am a musician, and this is me.
We are all fishing for the “Big One”. Alone on our boat drifting along, we cast out to a sea of unknown. Whether it is that one big dream, that life you have always wanted, the special someone we call “The One”, it is all one big fishing trip.
I will always remember the moment of spark that birthed Gone Fishin. I was alone in the kitchen of my small apartment in Chicago, and I had a thought about this amazing woman I just met. After so many failed relationships in my past, I thought to myself, “What will it feel like when I actually meet the person I will be with the rest of my life?”. “Will I know when I catch the Big One?” Immediately thoughts about fishing alone on a boat filled my head, I ran to my guitar and wrote Gone Fishin.
One night shortly after I wrote Gone Fishin, I stopped by a local open mic to try out my new creation. After playing I met a few new friends and was asked to come jam and record a song at a great studio in Chicago. So off to a late night recording session I went. It was a surreal experience for me, having done mostly home studio recording, I was experience the cream of the crop first hand. I was taken into the equipment room where there was a treasure trove of the most amazing musical gear I have ever seen. There in the front was a Gibson Songbird which I grabbed right away and said “This is the one.” We sat down and in just a few takes came this version. We sat there and listened to the track after the session and it was one of those amazing unforgettable times in my life. I thought to myself, “This is a big moment in my life and I want to share it with that big catch I have been waiting for. “ So I made a phone call. I casted my line and finally have the catch of my life.
Gone Fishin for me is a song that really hit the top of my songwriting. Every time I play it, the song itself hits me with so much feeling that I am beside myself. If I could never write again, I would be content in just knowing that I created this song. Gone Fishin was written in 2010 and this is the recorded version from the session at Rax Trax in Chicago.
Saying goodbye is probably one of the hardest things we face in our lives. Most of the time we don’t even realize that that very moment will be the last time we see that person. We live with a constant fear of things ending, because inevitably everything ends. When we meet the ends of things face to face, it’s mostly the shock that takes over. Later we are left with a scene as vivid as watching on a movie screen, where we wish we could re-write the script. But a great movie is always the one that tears at your heart strings. The credits roll and a new chapter begins.
I had one such memory that played out like a movie. It was one that to this day makes me hate airports. Many years ago I said goodbye to a friend and watch her leave on an airplane never to return. I held on to the memory for so long because it invoked so much feeling. When I thought back to that moment, I could even still hear the sounds of the busy airport bustling around us. I had no words at that time, and I think I was still processing it. That was until, I wrote the song Away. From the very first note I struck on the piano, I knew this was the place to lay that memory to rest.
Away is one of my most favorite songs I have written, because I feel that I really took a part of myself and put it to music. As a songwriter, breathing life into a song by taking away your own breath is a challenge that is the hardest to overcome. Writing about a lamp or a chair is one thing, but memories and experiences are what make music.
Away was written and recorded in 2010. It has never been released until now.
It’s programmed in our nature to want to capture what we see, what we think is beautiful and make it our own. We just can’t simply let things be. Whether it’s a beautiful view that we must build a house on, a cute wild animal that we want to take home, or beautiful butterfly that we want to capture for a collection, it is human to consume. This is also true in relationships. Instead of letting things happen naturally, we tend to want to capture one another and make things go the way we want them to.
One evening several years ago, I was outside thinking about those things and a butterfly happened to fly into the picture. I watched it flutter around and spend time going from place to place. Thoughts such as, I don’t have a net to catch you, I am not going to pin you down, I hope you want to stay filled my mind. It dawned on me how much those thoughts compare to going through the start of a relationship. Just saying, “You’re beautiful, hope you decide to stay awhile” is so much like watching the butterfly. It’s the way of letting nature and the butterfly decide. So out of that experience came the song Butterfly.
Butterfly has been a great experience for me. It has been one of my most popular songs and has been one of my personal favorites. I enjoy it every time I play it, which not all of my songs can do for me. It has made a few changes during the years, but it still remains closely the same as when I first wrote it. This version was recorded for my “The Day Before” album in 2007.
We all have hopes for things to come with visions of how it could be. So many times we get lost in the vision that we don’t notice the things that are right in front of us. This especially happens when we meet new people and we are deciding if this is the right one or not for a relationship. We think, “This isn’t how I imagined it”. I myself have been guilty of this many times.
With writing songs, it’s hard to imagine something without putting a face to it. It’s especially hard when that song is a love song. With Beautiful Girl, I wrote about a faceless possibility. The song was a vision of how it could be, but I didn’t want to get tied up in an image of a person that I was writing about. The song is more of a dream, a movie that is looking for the right person to fill the roll.
Beautiful Girl has been a personal favorite of mine. It was originally released on my “Sandbox” album in 2003. This version was recorded for an unreleased album in 2007.
Growing up is hard to do. We take it all for granted, the time that flies by as we go through life. As we remember our past, there are things that stand out. For me, there are a few events that stand out. They are moments that seem to never fade. All of them have to do with a relationship I had with somebody in my lifetime and it started when I was kindergarten.
I had my very first girlfriend in Kindergarten. The memory seems to last forever, that amazing recess time. If I was back then, I know I could never imagine the many, many years to come and that the world goes so far beyond the fences of the school playground. Of course, many more experiences were yet to come. Still, those times are a permanent slide show spinning around through my mind. As I went through the trials and errors of learning what it was to be growing up, there were many more moments that filled my life. Each one holds it place in a memory slot and will always be something that I cherish.
By taking a few snapshots of times in my life, I wrote a lifetime in a song. Spinnin is all about the feeling we all get when we look up, go back to a time that made us smile, and say “I remember when”.
I wrote Spinnin in 2003 and was released on my “The Day Before” album in 2007. This version is a new and improved version re-mastered from the album.
It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as the word Hi can make in the world. Just those two little letters can change someone’s whole life. It is one of those interactions that we can all see so clearly that if the word goes unspoken, an entirely different lifetime would exist. It’s a pretty safe bet to say that most chapters in your life, especially relationships, start with one word, Hi.
Just like the whole premise of the word hi and how it can catch you by surprise, the song Hi did that very same thing for me. I had grown up taking piano lessons, but never followed up through the years with playing regularly. After years and years of playing guitar, I wanted to go back to my roots and pick up piano again. I went out and bought a decent stage one, and spent hours and hours relearning how to play. The only thing was something that came so easily to me on guitar, was not working so well on piano. I couldn’t get a song out of those keys. So I went for inspiration from a simple interaction that stemmed on the word Hi and out came a song.
Hi took on a life of it’s own after that. Every time I would play or listen to it, I felt it was the piano that was saying Hi to me. It was saying, “Hi, now I am in your life and I am going to change it”. It was the very first song I wrote on piano, and it certainly wasn’t the last.
Hi was released on my “The Day Before” album in 2007. It is the most downloaded of any song I have ever recorded and has never been played live on stage.
Years ago I had a notion that the universe is one giant ocean where everyone is floating around on their own destination. We push and pull each other as we make our way through time. As we lose the ones we orbit through our lifetime, it’s ok to understand that we are on a journey to somewhere far and that we are all just shooting stars.
Worlds Apart has been a song close to my heart through the years. I wrote it originally with the thought of getting over losing someone and basically understanding that it’s ok to move on. A few years after I wrote it, I lost my grandfather. When faced with the task to go through all the things in his attic, I came across an old, hundred year old, classical guitar. I asked my family if it was ok to hold on to it, they agreed and I took the old guitar home. My grandfather had music in his blood, and so did his father. His father played the guitar and passed it down to him. When I play the guitar, I can almost feel the great distance in generations come through in the sound. One night, I sat down with the guitar, hit the record button on my studio, and played Worlds Apart on that old guitar. The result was a ghostly recording of the song. It really hit home to me capturing the true feeling of Worlds Apart. Even through the generations we are all still connected. Through the vast sea of broken hearts, we find comfort in knowing that we are all homeward bound.
Worlds Apart was written in 2002 and this song was recorded in 2004. It has never been released on an album.
Judgment Day by Manic Lane
A few years ago I got the opportunity to play in a music festival in Nashville, Tennese. It was right on Music Row and I had the time of my life. Nashville lives and breathes music. Whether it’s live music, festivals, karaoke, open mics, or random street performers, music is everywhere. The vibe of the city just takes you in and it is impossible to have a bad time. While I was there, I had this thought of what it would be like if there was no music around. If the world was ending and apocalypse was upon us, would the music of city save us all? Surely, if the music stopped in Nashville, the world is over.
When I returned home from my tour in Nashville, I sat down to write some of the ideas that came to me while I was there. Out of the ideas came Judgment Day. I used many references to the end of the world, but the whole point of the song is that the music will keep us all alive. Last year when the floods hit Nashville, a headline in the news read, “The Music Stopped in Nashville”. It was a twist of irony that I hoped would never come to pass. The one positive thing that came from that horrible event, was the amazing example set by the Nashville residents. When faced with such a crisis, they rose up to help each other get through. I feel it truly was the underlying music network that pumps the life to the heart of Nashville.
Judgment Day is an unreleased song that was written in 2009. This is an acoustic version recorded in Feb 2011 and a new version will be released on an upcoming album.
Indecisiveness is the unswimmable undertow that pulls you under a seemingly calm sea. The constant on/off of not knowing can pull people in so easily and leave them wondering, “will they, won’t they?” It often gets mistaken as love, that longing feeling when someone turns cold, then hot again. Everybody knows somebody like that and everyone has been that type of person too. We all face the question, “I don’t know what to do”. Some people never decide.
Tied Around is about the indecisiveness in a person and how they can so easily have the world wrapped around their finger. It was initially written about an actual person I know, but it has taken on a life of its own. When I wrote it, I had no idea how it would relate to so many people. It marked a new phase for me in my songwriting. Tied Around for me felt like, and still does, more of a conversation I am having with the audience. I went more for a Pop genre sound with Tied Around which was a departure from my usual writing. The amazing thing about this song is, it is my most popular yet it hasn’t been on any album.
Recently, I was able to see just how this song can reach out to somebody. It was an amazing experience for me to visually see the universe at work. I was playing an afternoon gig. Out in the audience there was a guy that had been waiting alone at a table for at least a half hour or so. He kept checking his phone for the time and looking out the door to the outside. Someone was standing him up for sure. I proceeded to play Tied Around without even paying attention to the coincidence. Halfway through the song, I noticed him turn all his attention to the song. After the song ended, he asked me, did that really say she’ll mess around with you? I confirmed and he was taken aback by the irony and decided to stop waiting for the girl that stood him up. Having a song direct a course of action in one’s life is amazing to me. So many songs that I have listened to during my lifetime changed my course just the same.
Tied Around was written in 2006 and this version was recorded Feb of 2011. A new version will be on an upcoming album.
Many years ago, an old musician friend once told me, you never put someone’s name in a song. It’s an old curse for songwriters that goes back who knows how long. If you do, you are dooming any relationship you have with that person and dooming the song itself. Well, I ignored that.
I had a good friend at the time that had asked me repeatedly to write a song for her. I don’t think she had in mind her own name being the title, but I wrote it anyway. Sweet Leanne is a lyrically simple song but it is on top of a catchy melody. I played it for her, then went on to performing it live through the next year afterwards. I am not sure if it was the curse or something else, but it definitely changed the time afterwards. Our friendship faded and the song became one of my most popular songs. It became requested everywhere I played. The only thing about that was, I always felt odd about singing the name of someone I knew on stage. Writing about people in a song is one thing, but naming the face changes the whole dynamic for me. Eventually, I stopped playing it all together. I actually still get requests to play it to this day. One of the shows that someone requested the song, I asked them why they liked it. I wondered because it had someone else’s name in it. They replied that it catches them by surprise and they can imagine being in that situation of someone telling them those things. It didn’t matter to them the name, they feel it’s their own name. I have to admit now that I no longer play it live, and listening to the recording, it sort of takes you on a ride and catches you off your guard just like the line I blindly wrote for the chorus.
This song was written in 2003 and was never released on any album. After this song I swore never to put someone’s name in a song again.
Whenever I write a song, I can never imagine the journey it will take me on. My only hope is that my songs will touch at least one person out in the world. This song did just that.
Early in my career, I wrote Guilty As Charged. One of my guitar practicing techniques, was to play guitar while doing something else, such as watching tv, to improve my ability to play guitar without focusing on it directly. During one of my practices one summer afternoon, I was playing this chord progression I came up with while watching the boring re-runs on tv. On came an episode of Matlock and an actor said “guilty as charged”. So I started singing it with my guitar hook and it stuck. I went on to write the verses with metaphors of judicial terms in relation to being in love.
On to the stage to play it, I performed it at one of the first of many music gigs. While playing at another venue, I heard a shout from the audience to play Guilty As Charged. It was the very first time I ever had an actual request of any of my songs. The person in the audience was another fellow musician that had heard me play it before. We became friends afterwards and he eventually played a few shows with me. A few years went by and my friend was taken from this world. I was asked along with a few other musicians to play at his memorial service. I chose Guilty As Charged to play, and it was the hardest performance I have ever done.
My song was able to reach out to another soul and bring an amazing person into my life. For that very reason, I will write songs until my last breath.
Guilty As Charged was written in 2002 and this version was recorded in 2006. It was released on my “Sandbox” album in 2003.
I tend to draw inspiration on memories of my past or events and feelings that happen during those times. Memories are wonderful and I feel they truly define who we are today. As a songwriter, I capture those memories and put them to music. In my early writings, I hadn’t learned just how to make them separate moments themselves. I would hold onto those feelings each time I played and would get lost in the memory and not the song. The Beach Song was the song that changed all that for me.
The Beach Song is as pretty straight forward as it goes. I spent an afternoon on the beach with a person from my past and it all hinged on her spelling the words “I Love You” in the sand. Now as cheesy as it is, I knew it just had to be put into a song. So, one afternoon I sat with guitar and wrote out the chords and lyrics for The Beach Song. Surprisingly, it was the fastest I had ever written a song at that point in my song writing. The whole process was done in two hours. The lesson for me though didn’t end there. I went on to make my debut performance for her at her place, and she loved it. Being on a musical high, I got up to move and my guitar bumped into her dresser. I hit it hard enough to have a box full of pictures fall off the shelf and scatter on the floor. There on the pile of pictures lay a photo of the words “I Love You” spelled out in the sand. It was a pretty ironic moment indeed. The only thing about that photo was, it wasn’t taken of the sand words that she spelled out for me. Turns out she was a serial sand writer. I thought to myself, “Oh well, at least I have a song out of it”.
From there my emotions went into performing the song to my best ability each and every time. It became my “home” song where I would play it first in every set to get me focused on playing. The Beach Song really helped me reach progress and will always be close to my musical heart.
The Beach Song was written in 2002 and this version was recorded in 2006 for my “The Day Before” album.
My dad always said, when he goes that he will be buried underneath a great big oak tree. As his life passed, he was buried underneath that very tree on a hill facing the sun. I am not much of a cemetery person. I believe the spirit goes somewhere else in the universe and the grave is a spot to bury our memories. But of all the places I could imagine my dad hanging out, it is the most peaceful one underneath that tree. So I wrote a song from the perspective of his soul on that journey.
Since I don’t live in my hometown and visits back home are far and few, I wrote and released this before I went back to visit that spot on the hill. Right after its release I went to see the tree and I had a horrifying vision. That very tree that stood so full of life just before I wrote this song, was now completely dead. Surrounded by the lush summer, the tree was black and still. I have tried to grasp the meaning of it for all these years since. The final verse is “I will wait for you to see, what is underneath the tree. When the sun comes down on me, I will be free” tied into the chorus, “I am faced with no regrets, moving on is all that we get”. Was this a whisper from him to me through the lines of music? Whatever it was, whatever it is, I will only know when my journey to the tree embarks.
Underneath The Tree was written in 2006 and released on my world wide album “The Day Before” in 2007.
Sometimes out of the blue, something comes along and takes you by surprise. This song did just that for me. I honestly can’t remember the exact moment I wrote it. I do remember a few times after when someone asked me where I come up with the ideas for my songs. For this song, I imagined a life of a traveling, broke musician as he was trying to keep the pieces together of some sort of home life in the world. I stepped into a fictional character that eventually found its way to reality in my experiences through my musical career.
Long Way From Home marked a new journey for me in treating the recording process the same way I would an instrument. It’s the first time I experimented with different sounds such as the old vinyl record intro and of course playing harmonica on a track. It was recorded for my “13 Stories” album back in 2002. The sad thing about the “13 Stories” album is that almost all the masters from the original recordings have been lost or destroyed. Long Way From Home was one that was lost for good. This is a re-master from the released version.
Sometimes you just feel angry and want to let it out. Being that most of my songs tend to be more on the melancholy side or “love” topic, I wanted to convey a more gritty type of feeling in a song. Just as the title implies, some things are just purely poison and no good, including people. But really, I just wanted to write a song where I could use the word F*#K.
Toxic was short lived. I wrote it in the summer 2006 and recorded it right away. I played it a few times live, but after my last performance of it someone yelled out asking if I could play the Britney Spears version of Toxic. Since my music taste tends to lean more to the non-Britney Spears side, I hadn’t heard the song. I went home that night and listened to the song on the internet and the only thing I was thinking was, F*#K.
Toxic was buried away among my many b-sides and I never played it live since that show. Here is the original re-mastered recording.
As we get older, we tend to look back on things that made us happy. They can be different for everyone, but for me, it was my sandbox. My biggest worries then were which toys I was going to use to make my sand city and how long I would be able to build it that day. Times were much simpler then. I had no thoughts of the realities of the world such as bills, what careers to choose, losing loved ones, or finding the right one to spend my life with. Whatever I wished, I could use my little toy bull dozer and build it in the sand.
So with the thought of my sandbox, I started to write a song about growing old and remembering when. I still remember the night I wrote it. I was 24 at the time, back in 2001, and it was right before my very first actual gig at bar event. At that time, the guitar was still very, very rusty. Instead of debuting it right away, I took the time to perfect it. It took me almost a year until I was finally satisfied with playing the guitar on the song, since it is definitely more of a technical song of mine. When I did start performing it, then releasing it on an early album, it was definitely one of my most popular songs. To this day, it is still probably my most requested song.
Since Sandbox is about growing old and wanting to go back to being young, it has been increasing in its meaning for me due to a line in the song. The line is, “well I am 25 years old and I am spending just another lonely night”. I chose to never change that line knowing through the years I would still play it. Each time I play it tends to be a reminder for me that I am still getting EVEN older.
Sandbox has been a very fun journey for me. People relate to it in so many ways, and that is the reason I truly love writing songs. This version was recorded for my “The Day Before” album in 2007 and has been re-mastered.
Castles is a unique song for me. My usual songwriting process involves me writing the lyrics as I create the melodies on guitar or piano. Castles was written entirely with no music in mind. It was initially written as a poem that I later added music to. To this day, it is the only song of mine that was written this way.
Castles is a song about going through the period after a break up. Each line in the verses represents an imagery of the feelings somebody can feel during that time. It all gets tied together in the chorus. We tend to make our relationships a sort of stronghold, a castle if you will. When those relationships end, the castle walls crumble and you are lost wandering the world looking to find another place to build a stronger castle.
This song was written back in 2001, and is one of my oldest. The music has changed through the years, but the basic structure has remained the same. This version was recorded in 2008 for my unreleased album, ”Sidestreets and Alleyways”. I feel it represents the mood and feelings I was looking for when I originally wrote it.
I have a personal connection with Stars Inside. There is a secret about it that I have held onto since the day I wrote it.
Several years ago, I wanted to write a song as a gift for someone on Valentine’s Day. Naturally I was going for a type of love song. I sat there racking my brain for ideas of lines to write, but nothing was coming to me. There was no love to be sung about. So, playing around with different guitar tunings, I found this melody that I just loved. I closed my eyes and listened to the music and words just started flowing out. The love song was taking it’s shape. I finished it, recorded it, and said “this song is for you”. Not being well received, I put it into my personal favorites. The deep dark secret about this song is actually who, or I should say what, that this is written about. When I was searching for love lines to write about, the only thing I knew I loved more than anything was Music and my guitar. Yes, this song was all about what it felt like to close my eyes and just play music.
The recording took an even greater hold on me. I feel that this is the sound I truly was going for in the creation. It marked a new level of engineering for me as I took on more of the producing aspect of music. It’s one of the few songs of mine, I really enjoy listening to.
