1. Songwriting process - The music always came first. I’d work out grooves/chord progressions and save them in Logic (recording software). Periodically, I’d listen and if something sounded like it had potential, I worked with it.

2. Lyrics were more difficult since I’d not really been writing any. I made lists of interesting sounding words, rhymes, phrases that I’d find in books/articles. I would cut & paste things together until I liked what I read.

3. We have practice rooms here at Schmidt (where I live) and I’d go there and play snippets of potential songs on my phone while walking around and trying to sing and come up with melodies. Very little time went into refining melodies. I tried to record them as soon as I could.

4. The album art depicts a four or five year old boy from the early ‘60s holding his toy truck. He’s looking across the river at a toxic (although he doesn’t know that word yet) refinery spewing poisonous waste into the air that he breathes.
   I grew up in the early ‘60s in a town called Avalon, which is about five miles from downtown Pittsburgh, PA. There was a chemical refinery directly across the river from my house. At night I could see the flame from the flame stack that burned off the excess gas at the plant.
   In 2023, I was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma called Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulanemia. This is a cancer of the bone marrow and is caused by chemical exposure. Avalon has a much higher than the national average for cases of cancer.

5. Album beginnings - In the summer of 2023, I wrote the song “Paper Moon.” This was to be an homage to one of my favorite guitarists, Robin Trower. I’ve followed him since 1974 and I still have my original copy of his album Bridge of Sighs. I can hear the influence of Trower’s song “Bridge of Sighs” on “Paper Moon” and then I decided to do an album of music inspired by the music and playing of Robin Trower.

6. The instrumentation is essentially a power trio format, guitar, bass and drums, throughout the entire album. I think, as a result of my classical training, the music comes off as more complex because of the counterpoint amongst the three instruments and the voice.

7. The Recording Process - The recording software that I use is called Logic and it includes a very powerful drum program. It does use AI to create drum patterns based on the guitar or bass part that I recorded first. But it’s far from perfect and it needs a lot of editing. I spent countless hours refining what the AI drummer would create because things were never exactly what I wanted. On many occasions, I ended up adding/deleting individual drum beats, listening to Reg Isadore’s (Robin’s drummer) drum parts and trying to build something similar. I think I ended up with drumming that I would play if I actually played drums.

The Songs

1. Breakfast at Death is a phrase that I ran across, somewhere but I can’t recall where, and it struck me as interesting so it became a song. It struck me as a bad place to have begin one’s day. I wrestle with my feelings about folks who profess a belief in Jesus and God and Christianity and yet in their daily lives they are racist, hateful and most importantly blind to this fact. I figured that they already have breakfast at death.

2. Kid From Yesterday is essentially about my exposure to chemicals when growing up in Pittsburgh. It’s not that I hate Pittsburgh, I just don’t want to live there. I spent my first 18 years in Pgh. But essentially I “grew up” in AZ. This is where I learned to play guitar and there are “Different ways to know what’s right for me. Transforming into what can really be.”

3. Paper Moon is the idea of wanting or striving for something you think is beautiful and great, but really, you know that is a false illusion. For many years I thought I was a better musician that I actually am and this song was sort of a reckoning with the fact that I’m a pretty good musician and that’s that.

4. I Feel The actually came as the result of watching a Rick Beato video on AI songs. I’m not much of a fan of his, but this video resonated with me. I think the bit about Spotify actually creating AI songs and populating playlists with them, thus taking the market away from real musicians and putting it in their pockets. The verse section of this song drifted pretty far from Trower; more towards King Crimson’s song “Thela Hun Ginjeet.”

5. In My Soul is strongly patterned after Trower; specifically his song “I Can’t Wait Much Longer.” One challenge I faced in writing “in the style of” was treading the line between writing material based on another song/style vs. outright plagiarism. There were many songs that, although I liked what I was doing, I had to abandon because they were too similar. In the end, I just play the way I play and it sounds like me.

6. Same Old Serpent is an example of tuning to drop D and just playing a very simple groove. With the layered guitars in the melodic passages it came alive. This is also a good example of the vocal melody be distinctly separate from the guitar, and the the bass is also doing its own thing. The result is a complexity that I find intriguing. And as one of my former students once said, “If there’s a way to complicate things, you’ll find it.”

   The lyrics for Same Old Serpent came from an article by an Australian political writer about the first 60 days of the current administration quoting from a speech by Abraham Lincoln in Chicago of July 10, 1858 wherein Lincoln states “Turn in whatever way that you will…it is all the same old serpent”

   The white Persian cat is a reference to Blofeld’s cat in the Jame Bond movies wherein the cat is the armchair pet of the evil ruler.

   The unwinnable war is T’s struggle to gain his father’s approval which he can never do.

7. Shadow of Your Deeds is another track based on a specific Trower song. This time it was “SMO”, a lesser known song from his Long Misty Days album. I reacquainted myself with the wah pedal while writing these songs and it was enjoyable. I think every guitar part in this song was played through the wah. For me, it created a funkiness and a constant forward motion. Lyrically, this song is similar to Breakfast at Death. Ananias was a greedy guy from the Acts of the Apostles (a book in the New Testament). In the early Christian Church everyone was supposed to pool all of their resources into one pile so that everyone could have enough. Hmmm. And why wouldn’t you want everyone to have enough? Anyway, Ananias lied to the elders when asked if he had contributed everything to the group. I’m not sure how, but the elders knew this to be false and right there and then, he was struck down dead. Well, my lyric equates Ananias with our fearful leader in DC. If only dropping dead were that easy. Somehow I don’t see Jesus calling the four thousand people (you know, the loaves and fishes story) losers and failures. No, he just met their need and he fed them. “Judged and condemned, for this you are proud.” Yeah, all these self-righteous folks were given a choice and yes, they threw it away.

8. Dreaming of Flying - I first thought about this song in mid 2025 when my mom was rushed to the ER and they couldn’t find her a room, so she was lined up in the hallway overnight. That gave me the lyric “Lined up and waiting, when that day arrives.” I didn’t see it as a bad thing, but rather part of life wherein we move in that direction from birth. My mom was released from the hospital and lived another six months. She died shortly before Xmas 2025 at 99 years old. I saw her death as a sort of flying off into the clouds that eventually we all will do. What’s important is what we do with our time while here. I hope that I am a positive influence in this world.

9. What Once Was Lost was influenced musically by some of the songs on Trower’s album In City Dreams. Lyrically I wrote it about the effect divorce had on my life and also on my partner Susan’s life. When you’re young and you get married, there are expectations: love, family kids, etc. After divorce some of that is lost. For the past 29 years, happily (at least for me and I think for her as well) we were able to “rewrite what once was lost.”