"Cocktails"...new record coming in October!

If I’m not in my studio making some kind of noise...I am a fish out of water. I have been that way since I was a kid. Every once in awhile I have to force myself OUT of my little pond, and step back and observe whether I’ve managed to make any noise nice enough to play for someone other than myself. I don’t know about you, but the ‘noise and information’ level has been increasingly cranked-up to ELEVEN on my life’s amplifier. Everything seems to be competing for my attention. I’ve come to the conclusion that all I can do is focus on the things that really matter to me. Somehow it seems this OVERWHELMING world turns out to also be very FREEING. I am forced to simplify due to overload. Well, I’ve recently jumped out of my ‘pond’, and decided I have a pretty nice handful of songs to play. It’s a little batch I’m calling “COCKTAILS”. There are 7 songs, one for each day of the week, and I love them all. In December, I recorded basic tracks with my friends Don Dixon and Jim Brock, at Brock’s studio in North Carolina. And just this first week of May, I flew to Dixon’s studio in Ohio, where he recorded, live, a four piece string section of arrangements he had written for most of the ‘cocktails’. They are absolutely gorgeous. Dixon continues to blow my mind. He is KING! Both sessions were amazing. I try to soak in all that beautiful and professional musicianship. For me it is the BEST part about writing songs. Working with people I respect, and in this case, that I love. All around and in-between those two sessions over the last year, I, (and another musical cohort Marti Jones), have been writing and singing and recording vocals. Somehow, just typing this fact, makes it perfectly clear why I call it “Cocktails”. Well, that, and the subject matter of the songs. Also my friend Mick Hayes, an excellent musician living in Ireland, lent his jangle-jangle Banjo to one of the tunes. His musical touch, as well, encouraged me to pull my head out of the water, and see that there might be something sort of interesting about these 7 songs. It doesn’t matter how many there are...they just feel ‘done’ and somehow ‘connected’. So I just wanted to prime the pump for another inevitable round of tooting my own horn about how excited and proud I am of this batch of songs. I’ll be mixing Cocktails, (literally), this summer in Ireland, and plan to release a limited pressing of the disc on Saturday, October 27th in Nashville, TN @ The LeQuire Gallery. It will be in tandem with a solo show of paintings by Marti Jones Dixon called, “3-D: Diners, Drinkers and Dancers”. It happens to be the weekend before Halloween. Somehow appropriate. It will be a celebration, both visually and aurally. We’ll be doing a little live show there that night, with more dates to follow. More on that later….. “Cocktails” will be served this October. I am, once again, extremely psyched.