A New Start

I spent the first decade or so of my adult life trying to become a rock star. I failed, but I did manage to make a lot of totally awesome mistakes along the way. One mistake was thinking that it was OK to get on stage looking like this:

Another mistake was in the glass behind me.

In the nineties, I was running PA at a club three nights a week and gigging with my band at least a few times a month. Then life happened. And happened some more.

By the year 2002, I was so drunk, bloated and depressed that I had quit playing music entirely and taken a job as manager of a discount shoe store. Whatever zest for life that I still had , it died at that job. Selling cheap shoes to gin-soaked housewives was not exactly my dream job, but it was an excellent way for me to crush my dreams, seemingly forever.  At the end of one year, I had developed a serious neuropathic disorder that almost cost me the use of my left arm. It  required two surgeries to correct.

Then things got worse.

After they stopped getting worse, they started getting better. By the end of 2005, I was the host of my own FM radio music program, and by 2009, I was playing guitar again.

Cary Grace is the reason I started playing  again. Cary is a writer/singer/multi-instrumentalist/producer with several albums to her credit. I was a fan before we ever started communicating.

I was spinning songs from her 'Projections' album on my radio show when Cary found  herself on my playlist via this blog.  Emails were exchanged and mutual interests were discovered; after some discussion, we decided to record a CD together. The only problem was, she lives in England and I live in America.
 
So we used the internet to send bits of songs back and forth for months, which was a new, but very cool way to record an album. Two of the musicians from her 2009 double-LP 'Perpetual Motion' joined us and Monday Machines was born.


Our first album is finished and now available in two versions:

-A Limited Edition CD with handcrafted case and booklet.  These are almost sold out, so move fast!

-A Virtually Unlimited Digital edition which readers of this blog can purchase for a mere dollar. It comes with all the music from the CD, as well as a special lyric/photo booklet that is available nowhere else. Be the first on your virtual block to own it!
 Details on the sidebar-->>

Here's a review of the album

In any case, now that I'm playing guitar again, I don't feel like stopping. There's a lot of work to be done, but man...I get to play my own band on the radio- how cool is that?
That is like my teenage dream come to life, minus the fame and riches, of course. But that's OK with me. I mean,when I was young, I couldn't handle the pressure of being poor and obscure, so being 'rich and famous' would certainly have killed me. It happens, you know.

Anyway, the future sounds musical to me.

Thanks for listening.

A Lesson In Progress

If you want your dreams to become true, you have to be willing to sit on your butt and wait for them to arrive, hopefully in a convenient form such as an email  or a text message.

Last July, I was sitting and doing nothing when I received an email from Cary Grace, a musician who was new to me at the time, thanking me for playing her music on my radio program and directing me to some of her other recordings. Her music resonated with me on many levels and made me want to play guitar again,  I wound up telling her that listening made me want to break out my old  FX pedals and she asked me to send a song or two to her, so I did.  I'm very glad I did, because I almost didn't.

As a DJ, I exchange a fair number of band-related emails , but that was the first time I'd ever included a sample of my own music in one. I hadn't played seriously in years, so what would be the point, right?

Well, there doesn't have to be a point. If there's no point, you might as well do something that you enjoy, and I really enjoy music, so I let my guard down and sent Cary a couple of my old songs. She replied, calling my auto-didactic guitar  style "apocalyptic" and after that comment we pretty much had to record a CD together. So, along with Andy Budge (bass) and David Payne
( drums) , we started recording. The rest of the band lives in England and I live in the US, so we resorted to using carrier pigeons to send recordings back and forth across the Atlantic for many months, during which time Cary was mixing the songs and  assembling them  into an album format; the kind of record with a beginning , middle and end. It's not just a pile of files, it's an actual album of songs, some  planned, some spontaneous and most with elements of both. The song presented here is the beginning of the album and one of the most precious gifts I've ever received. It is shared here with the  hope that you enjoy it as much as I do...and don't worry, the alarm clock will stop soon enough.



For Cary's post click here.