This Might Tickle Just a Little

The eleventh song from “Life’s a Love Song” is a funky blues number with funny lyrics.  “This ain’t no ranch in Cukamonga, no time to reheat your chimichanga.   Just a redneck samba, I’m a little country and sometime’s it shows”.

Randomly enough the second verse is about Columbus, Georgia even though I wrote this a few years ago.  Since then I’ve worked and stayed in Columbus the equivalent of about six months.  It’s a nice city with a cool river running through the down town.   And it has a fantastic tennis facility that I frequent often when I’m there.

Anyway, I’m playing all the instruments on this with John Kell adding the sax embellishments.   I recorded it in Asheville and on the road in Statesboro, Georgia while building a megawatt solar project.    Mastered by Ricky Rodriguez at Bomb House Recording.

The pic below is an article written about my old band, Parakeet Nelson for the Columbus paper back in the day.  We used to have a regular gig there and also played the historic Bradley Theatre one time.   The header pic is of my dogs in Columbus after getting filthy on the solar site that day.

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Anniversary Song

I wrote this on my anniversary a few years ago and luckily it turned out to be one of Adair’s favorite songs! What seemed to be a quick and simple little song turned out to have some legs. You gotta love it when that happens.

I’m playing all the instruments except for John Kell’s sax, which gives it a bit of a Van Morrison feel.  Adair’s singing backing vocals with Rob Sankey, John Kell and me.  The song also features Ringo, my scruffy little dog, singing along to my harmonica at the end of the solo. Listen closely to see if you can hear it.
Thanks for listening!

Ringo with Mozart in the background

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The Square Root of Joy

This one has been my favorite song of mine for a few years now.  I love the four on the floor bass drum and of the course major seventh chords that I have a proclivity for using.   This happens to be one of my better drum performances too, I’m not a polished drummer these days so I’ll take any bright spots I can get.

The words are about change and looking ahead.  I wrote this one when we were just starting to make a move.  We were living in Asheville spinning our wheels and knew we had to make an upward move.   Atlanta was not yet a sure thing, we were exploring all of our options (I of course wanted to move to Las Vegas which is not a practical family decision).

“What will we be doing in August and September,  will we look back to this moment right now and remember”.

This song also has my favorite line I’ve written:

“The square root of Joy is Love, divided by two and it’s us, geometrically in perfect touch, we fit together like a glove”.

The song used to be called ‘Geometrically in Perfect Touch’ but since we had our twins and named one Joy, I had to change the name of the song to give her some props.

Joy, showing some metal

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Every Now and Then

Song #2.  This one has maximum “feel good” vibes.  Simple words about love and transition, originally written when we were living in Asheville and thinking about the big move to the ATL.  Needless to say, we made the transition and have never looked back (although I’ll always miss the NC mountains).

The music on this one has about as many counterpoint solos as one can handle (or possibly too many) with me playing multiple guitar, harmonica and piano leads and John Kell getting in some jabs on sax.  It’s short but sweet and is one I automatically want to turn up.

It’s got me on drums, guitars, bass, ukulele, harmonica, piano/synths, mandolin and vocals, John Kell on sax/backing vocals and Adair and Rob Sankey on backing vocals.

The pic below is the solar farm in Richland, Georgia that I was building at the time when I did a lot of the finishes to the recording on this one.  I actually found and negotiated the land and built most of this particular solar farm from beginning to end.

Click here to listen to or buy the entire album.