Once upon a time, I made EPs with a band called Losing Summer. By the fall of 2005, we had released 3 EPs, and were in the process of releasing an additional collection of 18 songs on a week-by-week basis (sound familiar?). During this time, I wrote a fourth EP that we referred to as [...]
True story. Nearly six years ago, I was in the studio and I received an instant message from a girl I did not know. We chatted a bit, but it was that awkward kind of chat where she actually knew me and was being personal, and I had no idea who she was and was [...]
Since it is/was Easter, I thought I’d post a very ridiculous song about bunnies – well, about one bunny – with an Icarus complex. Most people view the story of Icarus as a cautionary tale. For whatever reason, I’ve always found it daring and compelling and strangely inspiring. In this story, the bunny has made [...]
Sitting is an old new song. New, in that I just released it on last year’s I’d Let You Wear My Boots; old, in that I wrote it over 4 years ago. This week’s free download is a demo of the song I did in Vermont, prior to the recording sessions in Nashville. I’d just [...]
Last year, I spent several months living in Nashville while making my latest LP, The Room Is Spinning Faster. Oftentimes, I would have a few minutes alone in the studio before things got started for the day and I would just screw around on the piano. One morning in December 2009, I came up with [...]
This is one of those songs that’s about everything and nothing at the same time. One of those songs that’s about something very specific as well as about the entire picture. It’s about history repeating itself. Over and over again. As a songwriter, history repeats itself in songs. And every night, when you go on [...]
This week’s free song is punk rock. That is, it moves right along and is under 2 minutes long. This is another quick piano/vocal demo I did in a hotel while on tour in 2009. As there’s not much of a song, it would follow that there is not much of a story behind the [...]
To cap off this recent series of “songs by request/suggestion”, I’m putting up an old demo of Ballad of the Mountains, from my record I Have Never Been Fond of Falling From Heights (Swan Dive into the Atlantic). Sometimes, demos sound good – passable even. Other times, guitars are out of tune, vocals are out [...]
Free Music Week (11 of 52) – A Seasonal Song Continuing with the “songs by request or suggestion” theme, A Seasonal Song is a tune that I recently wrote, based on a Facebook exchange with a friend. During one of the January blizzards, I posted a picture of the snow from my bedroom window, with [...]
Once upon a time, a very dear friend of mine asked me to write a cMAS™ song. She was in a long-term relationship that had recently hit some rocky ground, and thought it would be nice if I’d write something upbeat for the holidays. Somehow, I thought it appropriate to write a song with minimal [...]
For the next several weeks, I’m going to be posting demos of songs I’ve written by request or suggestion. It’s really fun when others have ideas, and you can kind of get out of your own melodrama for a bit. I wrote this week’s tune - Song for a Floral Jacket - by request, about the most [...]
I wrote Happy Days in November 2007 while in Belfast. I’d just taken a drive through the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods (separated by a massive wall – the “peace line” – with guarded gates) with an Irish guide who had explained “The Troubles” and detailed the most recent decades of violence in Northern Ireland. This [...]
For those of you remotely familiar with my music, it should come as no surprise that when it came time to pick a holiday-appropriate free download for vDAY™, I came up a bit shorthanded. After digging through years and years of releases and unreleases, I finally remembered that I had a somewhat appropriate track on [...]
I finished recording The Room Is Spinning Faster in Nashville just a few weeks before the big flood of 2010. It was weird to be back in NYC, watching footage of where I had just lived for 6 months – with everything under water. My heart went out to my friends and all of the [...]
So, there really isn’t any plan for this 52 free song thing. I just wake up on Monday (of if I have time on Sunday) and choose whatever comes to me. It’s like playing DJ with your own music. I’m working on some different stuff for upcoming weeks (new songs, covers, etc.), but in the [...]
Tell Me You Love Me is a somewhat melancholy song about the games we play. We say one thing, we say another – but we really never say what we mean. The narrative of the song is essentially, “don’t tell me that you want to be with me, because after everything that’s been said – [...]
About five and a half years ago, a very good friend of mine called me up to tell me that she’d had a dream about me. In this dream, we were eating ice cream, and apparently I had dropped mine on the ground. I later wrote her this song to let her know that I [...]
This week’s free tune is a fight song about dinosaurs, socks filled with rocks, museums, blisters, personal loans, scars, whiskey, hit songs, and Daniel Day Lewis. Obviously, no further explanation is necessary. But The Dinosaurs Were Dead is the second track off of my latest LP, The Room Is Spinning Faster, available for download HERE. [...]
So, this is the first of 52 weeks of free music releases! In the spirit of the new year, I’m posting a song I wrote last cMAS™ (2009) called Resolution. The song is about second chances and wanting to start over. Like Natalie says in Love Actually, “If you can’t say it at Christmas, when [...]
I’m being featured on this week’s episode of Balcony TV Paris!! The video was recorded last month, and it was FREEZING outside (literally – it was below 32 F). So, naturally this is the “speedy” version of the song Sitting from my newest EP – I’d Let You Wear My Boots. View Video
