yeah,yeah, it's the holidays

I wrote and recorded a Christmas song for a well intentioned compilation record that never saw the light of the ornaments. We (Matt and I) recorded it with the Booker Lee boys and the Compound Choir up in Gettysburg. It's been posted to our myspace page (myspace.com/lawnchair) where it's available for listening and download. Here are the lyrics:

"Even Us"

The steps they're all icy
Every row home on the avenue.
The lights are strung all over town
And who's front door did she walk through.

First white Christmas we've had in years.
The snow quiets everything to a hush.
Peace on earth, good will to man
To everyone, but us.

We've both got closets full of skeletons.
We've both gone down some bumpy roads.
In the glare of the tinsel and the blinking lights
(Well) all those hard times sure do show.

First white Christmas we've had in years.
The snow quiets everything to a hush.
Peace on earth, good will to man
To everyone, but us.

Let's put it all aside for just one night.
Come a little closer let's thaw out our hearts.
Wrap up the bad blood between us
It seems like a good time for a new start.

First white Christmas we've had in years.
The snow quiets everything to a hush.
Peace on earth, good will to man
To everyone, even us.

WTF!?!

Yeah, so we played a show last night that... prior to getting into it... was a complete cluster fuck. The show was double booked then rebooked, but for a different room than we thought. Then, after wrangling everyone and the proper equipment and sound checking, our buddy Andrew Grimm played some songs to kick off the festivities. Grimm was playing through my guitar rig when my amp went up.

As if the night was not fucked up enough, my amp shit the bed. Well, Grimm is a pro and he got through it - all lit up for the holidays. The dude is a great writer and musician. Sorry about the whole mess, Grimm.

I was boiling from the entire fiasco. So we got rolling, but my head was swimming. I (we) struggled through the first couple of songs, but things pulled together as we went. Thanks to all the folks who came out and had fun with us. All in all I had fun playing... I pretty much always do. The boys are great and thank god we've got things back on track personnel-wise after a shaky fall. As the night drew to a close, folks were really into it, dancing and hollering and spilling beer. We had to shut down at midnight in the room we were in which bummed me out because I had finally shaken the baggage of the whole night, the boys were really tightening up and I could have played all night. We shut her down though, took a breath, and realized we came out of it alive and well and feeling better for it.

No, Mr. Grimm, we did not all die.... we came out alive. Maybe a little part of me is dead, but most of me is alive. Then of course it was a full-on scene trying to get out of there. Today I'm drained. Emotionally, physically. Everything does not have to be so fucking hard man. It really doesn't.

Old Yellow House

The night before our buddy who engineered the recording of Hard to Swallow came to my house (where we would record all of the live tracks over the next two days), I was sitting around playing and this song just fell out. Songs seem to happen this way more than not. If the words and music just spill out, the song is generally a keeper. Conversely, I find that songs that take rewrite after rewrite never see the light of day. Well, that is, until just recently but that's a topic for an entirely different post.

Anyway - I live in "Old Yellow House." It is a row home built in 1920 that spent a large chunk of its life as a bar... and from what I understand, a damn rowdy one at that. When I'm home alone and things are still, I can hear the stories damn near coming through the spaces between the floor boards. It's not in a haunted/ghostly way, just its own personality with too much to tell. I spend hours wondering about the drunken fights and drunken love and broken hearts drowning the pain in the same room where I spend most of my time.

Whatever it was/is that spoke/speaks to me on those quiet nights... it worked. We played that song, without a drummer, to get a feel for the room and the placement of the mics. We didn't even know that Colin was rolling as we played. Matt and Eric hadn't even heard the song before, but it all came together. We wound up using the first take. And from that take on, the next 48 hours of recording went smoother than any of us could have hoped.

Billy McCoy

I grew up a son of a gear head. As a child I could discern a passing classic as a '55 or '56 Chevy (the front end parking lights are the giveaway) at 60 plus miles per hour in the opposite direction. My early TV memories include sprinting to the tube every time I heard the growling sax riff that opened the Capital Raceway drag strip commercial... Sunday Sunday Sunday! The images funny cars spitting flames and lurching back onto the wheelie bars danced in my head.

So, many years later, I woke up one hungover Sunday morning with this tale of a small town racer done good (and bad) in my head. Nothing seems more rural than dirt track racing, and who doesn't love a story about someone selling their soul to the devil. I locked myself in our spare bedroom in the old apartment and banged out the chords 'till they went together. Add Billy McCoy to the ever-growing list of LAWNCHAIR songs that reference hookers... I have no clue why. Seriously.

Then, months later, I went to see the Drive By Truckers. The Stroker Ace himself Mike Cooley stepped to the mic to sing his first tune of the night- he slammed into "Daddy's Cup" a, then unreleased, song about small town auto racing. Damn! Ever since I've felt compelled to defend the fact that I wrote Billy McCoy months before I ever heard that song.

Faded Postcards

Faded Postcards was conceived in a dream-like state driving from my grandmother's funeral to a gig at the Cat's Eye in Fells Point. Talk about an evening of emotional extremes. I went from sad grieving to exercising the demon of loss out of my body and mind. Shaking it wildly and dowsing it with alcohol. As I drove past the hulking hulls of cargo ships, the sky had gone from Blood Red to Black and lightening was breaking horizontal across the sky. With with all that "fantastic light", I swear there was no thunder.

This strange phenomenon had my mind racing with all the things that children are told to be true... like, "Where there's thunder there's lightening." Shouldn't such things be true in reverse?!? And if not, what other mis-truths had I been told?

Thus, I was set "lookin' for some truth".

Uh, what the F!?!?!

Maybe it's just me... but would you show up your first gig with a new band WASTED!?!

What is the deal with drummers. We have one drummer who is fantastic, and a great guy. The problem is that he plays with a ton of bands, so he can't make every gig. We have played with a slew of other drummers... good guys most of them, but just not right. I feel like fucking Goldilocks... too loose, too deaf, too flakey. This guy Saturday night down right embarrassed us. Of course I take our music seriously, I wrote it, and this jackass shows up wasted. The tempo, it was like driving behind someone riding the break... all night. I damn near stomped a hole in the stage trying to get him on track. He said he couldn't hear. He said he plays off the vocal... what? I've never heard that before. He was sharing a kit with the other band and didn't bring his snare or cymbals... I thought this was like the unwritten code of drummers, maybe it is written somewhere. What an asshole. And, he comes to me after the show and says that he doesn't think he messed up. When I (very tactfully, mind you) told him differently... he said it had nothing to do with being drunk. Yeah. Sure. He was damn near passing out back there.

Well, maybe it's time to get back to the songs. Maybe it's the right time for the solo project. I love the band and will play every time our drummer can, but it's goddamn disheartening.

The jump...

How does one start a blog? Hell, if that's not a question tailor made for the 21st century then I wouldn't know what is.

Well, let's see.. the title comes from the band I'm in, Lawnchair. Thing are going well enough. We just released our second record (independently), "Hard to Swallow", with good reception at our well-attended CD release party. The band is in an odd spot right now. We took a bit of a break during the summer - which was much needed and enjoyed by me - that seems to have unraveled things a bit. As chief songwriter and all around fucking den mother for the band, I've had to scramble to get personnel and gigs back on track... but it's getting there.

Maybe what I should do here is give some back story to the songs... an exercise in narcissism if nothing else I suppose.

Hard to Swallow - is just a ramble about life's pit falls and this fucked up world of ours. The first verse is about love lost and personal mis-steps. The second verse is about W and his quest to FUBAR our whole ball of wax (yeah, it's been melting for years... that evil little bastard seems to be holding closer to the flame).

"The dunce is out of the corner,
He's right up on that hill.
The dunce is out of the corner,
He's right up on that (capital)hill.
Momma, I think that fool's gonna say something to get us all killed."


I guess that's a start. We'll see if I can keep this up. I've been writing a ton of songs... have enough keepers for a new record... probably enough for a solo project and a band project. Who knows if any of it will see the light of day.