If you’re interested, I just posted a new unreleased song/demo on my myspace page. The song is called “Bedlam and the Fuse”.

An old Louisiana buddy who’s currently @ MTSU studying music production asked me about a year ago if I’d be willing to be the subject of his semester-long school project: produce and record an original, non-cover song. I had just finished writing this song and, since my wife was pregnant at the time w/ our firstborn, I didn’t see myself recording any new albums anytime in the near future. It sounded like a fun idea. So my friend, Jon Bufkin, came over to my house one afternoon about this time last year, set up his computer, mics and cables and I played him the song so he could have a rough recorded sketch to pass along to the musicians who would later play on it. Jon rounded up all the players, helped me arrange the song to fit a specific time-length he had to adhere to, and before I knew it, I was standing in the great studio workshops @ MTSU very impressed by the gear the students had available to them on a daily basis. We tracked the instruments mostly in one very long night session amid coffee and pizza. I made a return trip a couple of months later to record vocals. My voice was shot that night, I remember, so I wound up going over to Jon’s house a week or two after that - sometime just before Thanksgiving - to re-sing the song. I’m glad we did; the result sounds much better. I don’t remember all the players’ names (forgive me), but they all did a good job and worked very hard to aid Jon in his project. I hope he got an “A”. The song is unmastered, but is more than presentable in this setting. I hope you enjoy it.

A note about the song itself:
It arose from my distress over the world’s seemingly willing plunge into further chaos and disorder over the course of the past few years (war, 9/11, suicide bombings, deep hatred, religious fanaticism, political divide, etc.). I had just finished reading Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and was struck not only by such an invigorating tale of survival, but also at the power of story-telling itself, whether it’s true or not, and how it somehow mysteriously manages to invoke peace in the one who tells it. Some things in this world are too horrible to remember; people cope as best they can in an effort to either forget the thing ever happened, or they grant narrative - their own narrative - the power to weave the story as a means of surviving and coping with such traumatic events. We’re human and we’re not as strong as we think we are. We’re human but we’re stronger than we think we are.