The 2014 CD release of What’ll It Be?, the
first ever solo album from singer-songwriter Barry Ollman is
a pleasant surprise. Although he’s been involved in the US music
scene for decades, it took the CD release of What’ll It Be?
to finally put Ollman on the map. Where he’s been all our
lives is a bit of a mystery but the ten track CD makes up for lost
time. Assisting Barry are notable musicians such as—Graham
Nash, Garry Tallent (of Bruce Springsteen’s band),
David Amram, keyboardist James Raymond and renowned
guitarist David Beegle. As a guitarist himself, Ollman is no
slouch and he sets the scene perfectly with the CD opener “Imogen’s
Lament”, recorded with Nash. Amazingly, Ollman looks and sings
like David Crosby, so it's no coincidence that Crosby’s long
lost son James Raymond plays keyboards on the album. The album rocks
and rolls and also has a definite folk-rock influence. Ollman’s
voice is strong and clear and is also reminiscent of late great singer
Phil Ochs. Ochs would have loved What’ll It Be?, which
is filled with honest and open lyrics and musical subject matter and
can’t get it out of your head hooks. Every song has something
to offer but clearly the lead off track “Imogen’s Lament”
and the rocking “Banker’s Holiday” are standouts. Fans
of Phil Ochs and CSN will get a jolt out of Barry Ollman’s What’ll
It Be? www.BarryOllman.com
mwe3.com presents an interview with
BARRY OLLMAN
mwe3:
You recently released your first solo album What’ll It Be?
which came out on CD on Blue Colorado Music. What were some of
the key events surrounding the album and why did it take so long to
record and release it? When and where was the music on What’ll
It Be? written and recorded?
Barry Ollman: I have a photo of me playing guitar at 8 years
old so I guess it really did take me a while to make this record!
I never stopped playing music but when fatherhood happened to me in
my late 20s, I sort of launched into provide mode and music became
more of a hobby or sideline for me. I had a band for ten years or
so during that time called The Thrills which was one part Big Chill
party band and one part men’s mental health group. Looking back,
the most significant aspect of this part of my musical life is that
I had stopped writing completely! I had been a fairly active writer
and performer in the late 1960s into the mid ‘70s. I did do some
recording back then but I’d say I really wasn’t ready to
make a go of it. I had other things I had to do.
I should add that I remained very connected to music throughout my
working life. First of all, I never stopped playing and I have so
many great friends in the music world that I could always turn to
for inspiration that music never turned to gray for me. It’s
always been in Technicolor; I just never chose to try to make a living
from it.
Incidentally, one project that I got involved with in the early ‘90s
was called Transperformance, now known as AxeCent Tuning Systems,
which involved the development of the self-tuning guitar. It’s
still going but I’m not really involved anymore. The technology
is brilliant and I managed to make a lot of great friends through
my work there. Dave Beegle, my co-producer on the record was our go-to
demo guy. Then I met Henry Gross at a NAMM show in Nashville and we’ve
become dear friends. Henry introduced me to Garry Tallent who’s
been more than generous, playing bass on four of my songs. Garry is
such a great guy and he knows pretty much everything about the music
I care most about. Henry also introduced me to one of my longtime
favorite players and singers, Felix Cavaliere of The Rascals, and
he’s been an inspiration for me as well. I’ve met other
awesome people through Henry… AJ Croce, Steve Forbert, even the
great Joe Brown ... The Beatles used to open for Joe Brown!. Henry
is a brilliant and dedicated songwriter himself, as well as a fantastic
guitarist. He’s also kept me laughing hysterically for the past
twenty years!
I should mention that I met a lot of other serious music people through
Transperformance, like Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Pat Metheny, Buddy
Miller and more. I get a lot of juice out of spending time with people
who manage to stay close to their creativity.
Fast forward
to the record. It probably started brewing around the time of the
Democratic National Convention in Denver in 2008. One of my dearest
friends in life is Graham Nash. Aside from having one of my favorite
voices in Rock & Roll, Graham has a well-deserved reputation for
being one of the truly great guys in the music world. I can confirm
that right here. He has a lot to say and I love that he sings from
his heart. Anyway, I invited him to come to Denver for the week of
the convention as I had access to some good seats for the various
events. I knew we’d meet some interesting people and Denver was
really buzzing at the time. So Graham and his son Will came out and
we spent a lot of time just walking the streets and soaking up the
energy, which was very intense, if you recall. Graham and David also
played an Etown show that was part of the DNC programming. James Taylor,
Irma Thomas, Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were
also on the bill. Graham borrowed my Guild D40 for that show and there’s
some great footage of him playing it. Warms my heart! Anyway, we had
a total blast that week, and by the time the election happened, I
was fairly well exhausted. I think the prospect of John McCain and
Sarah Palin running the executive branch was just too much for my
little lefty brain to wrap its arms around!
The morning after, when it was clear that Colorado had turned blue,
I sent Graham an email titled “Greetings from Blue Colorado”
and I told him I felt like I could breathe for the first time in months.
Then I picked up my 1966 Guild D40 and wrote Blue Colorado
in about an hour. It was literally the first complete song I’d
written in many years and it felt really good.
I made a little phone recording and sent it to Graham and he told
me to keep going with it. I wasn’t really sure what that meant
but it was definitely encouraging! A few weeks later, I bumped into
my old friend, Nick Forster, of Etown and Hot Rize fame, and in the
course of our conversation I casually mentioned that I had written
this song and I thought it might be interesting. He immediately suggested
that we record it, which honestly hadn’t even occurred to me.
I had yet to make the leap into any form of home recording and just
hadn’t been thinking that way. The next thing I knew, I was in
his studio working on Blue Colorado.
Nick is one of the best players you’ll ever meet and he played
two incredible solos on the song, one on a Les Paul and one on his
Weissenborn Lap Steel. Sweet and tasty as can be! Then he asked Helen
to come in and sing a harmony part and she just happens to be one
of my all-time favorite harmony singers! This was starting to get
exciting and I was pretty much hooked. Over the next few months, I
started to jot down lyrics as they came to me and one by one I started
developing some new song ideas.
Each song I came up with felt quite different from the last and I
really liked that. I found that I was able to draw from so many different
influences over my musical life and I somehow began to feel less afraid
of the writing process. The writer’s block that I’d lived
with over the years began to look like some sort of strange object
sitting up on a shelf. It would be made of fear and inhibition and
other weird shit that I don’t want in my life anyway! Why let
that keep me from something that I’ve always loved?
I think the second song I finished was Painting the West and
that’s a whole other story. Some other time… In any event,
I thought I might want to record it too and see what I could come
up with.
Nick had gotten me started but I knew he was too busy to do any more
recording at that time. It occurred to me to call Dave Beegle, who
was able to work me in to his schedule, and he has been a joy to work
with throughout this project. We recorded most of the record at Dawghouse
Studios at his place in Loveland, Colorado.
One thing I’d like to say is that I never really set out to make
a record. I just wrote and recorded one song, and then another, and
then another, until it began to resemble what I thought of as a record.
I used to laugh in a slightly embarrassed sort of way, when I was
first getting started, if someone said “Oh, you’re making
a record”. I really wasn’t so sure…
You asked where I wrote these songs. Virtually all of the songs were
written in my den, where I do my best thinking. I almost always write
in a spiral notebook with a mechanical pencil, in case anyone wants
to know…
mwe3:
Can you mention a few of the musicians playing with you on What’ll
It Be? especially as there are a number of pretty well known people
with you here.
Barry Ollman: Since this record is totally out of the blue
for just about anyone who reads this, I’m well aware that I have
Graham, Garry Tallent, David Amram, Nick and Helen, James Raymond
and the others to thank for giving me even the slightest cred here.
I’m seriously grateful to each one of them. I mean, I know there
are people out there who have never heard of Christian Teele, for
example, but he is one of the finest drummers and percussionists I
could ever work with. Put on some headphones and crank up this record
and pay attention to his playing. It’s amazing throughout. Christian
has been the drummer for Etown for over twenty years and he’s
played with just about everybody on their artist list. Ask Shawn Colvin,
James Taylor or Indigo Girls about the Etones and you’ll get
raves for their playing. Christian finds that groove every time and
just lives there. He has great subtlety as well.
As for David Amram, forget about it! It would take me hours to tell
his story. I met David in 1982 at The Lone Star Café in NYC
when he was sitting in with the great Steve Goodman. We hung out after
the show and I was amazed by him, even then. We reconnected in 2006
in Okemah, Oklahoma at the Woody Guthrie Festival and have had so
many great times together ever since. David has worked with everyone
from Leonard Bernstein and James Galway, to Charlie Parker, Dizzy
Gillespie, Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Hunter S. Thompson,
Pete Seeger and so many more. And he’s only 84! I’m honored
to call him my friend.
Some of your readers may know another dear friend of ours, Rad Lorkovic.
He’s also a favorite at Woody Fest and he is an absolute force
of nature on anything with a keyboard. When I picture Rad, he’s
usually playing an accordion, but he’s also a monster piano player.
Great songwriter, great singer… and a blast to hang with. He
played on a couple of tracks for me. The one that really breaks my
heart is The Old Country. His accordion parts are just perfect
for the song. I wrote and recorded pretty much everything you hear
in that song between midnight and 4:00AM one night, in my den, and
when I finished, I cried like a baby. It’s about a childhood
friend who passed away some years ago and that night I really reconnected
with his spirit and our friendship. The only parts that I added after
that night were Christian’s drum tracks and Rad’s accordion
parts.
Getting back to Garry Tallent, in case someone out there doesn’t
know, he’s been the bass player for Bruce Springsteen and the
E Street Band since the very beginning and he gets to rock the World
on a regular basis. I first got up the nerve to ask if he’d play
on my song “Banker’s Holiday” and he got all over it.
His bass track on that song still blows me away and if you listen
closely he throws in some cool electric guitar and tambourine too.
The slide guitars are all Dave Beegle. When I sent him the final mix,
he said it was “intense”. I’ll take that, coming from
a guy who plays the shows that he plays. By the way, Garry was recently
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the rest of
the E Street Band. Much deserved.
I do want to mention James Raymond who is not only a magnificent musician,
writer, arranger, producer and singer but he’s also an incredibly
warm and intelligent human being. I liked him immediately when we
first met. Some people know that he’s the “long lost”
son of David Crosby, but CSN would be lucky to have him on piano and
keyboards even if he weren’t. I asked him to play piano on my
song, “Almost Time”, and I love what he came up with. That
is some really beautiful playing. Listen carefully...
Again, I want to say that getting to work with Dave Beegle is such
a treat for me. He’s been blowing me away with his guitar work
for over twenty years and it was a huge bonus to learn that he is
also a deeply talented recording engineer.
mwe3:
Graham Nash sings back up on the lead off track “Imogen’s
Lament”. How far back do you go with Graham? I was thinking your
voice sounds similar in some regards to David Crosby too.
Barry Ollman: Well, first of all I’ve got to say that
Graham gave me a great gift when he sang on “Imogen’s Lament”.
We really made it more of a duet than a backup part. I grew up listening
to The Hollies and CSN and when he and I first became friends around
1989 or so, I really hadn’t been playing that much music. We’d
noodle around on guitars once in a while, at his house, or mine, but
it was a totally casual thing. I do remember very clearly the first
time we actually sang together. It was in February of 2002 and I was
at his house in Encino the day after his 60th birthday party. I was
sitting by myself in the living room playing a beautiful old Martin
D45 and for no particular reason I started playing Paul Simon’s
Bookends. You know the one… “time it was and what
a time it was. It was…”Dm to C… Graham walked by and
asked what I was playing. I told him what it was and he told me to
keep going and sing the lead bit. Suddenly he put the harmony on top
and that was it! It was a hundred percent unexpected and more beautiful
than any music I’d ever made. He smiled and went into the kitchen
and I just sat there feeling like I wanted out of that box I’d
put myself in. Looking back now, I’d say my muse was calling...
As for me sounding like Croz, I honestly don’t know what you’re
talking about. He’s ten times the singer I am and while I’m
flattered that you make the connection, I don’t think it holds
water. I think he’ll crack up when I mention it to him!
mwe3: Dave Beegle also plays on What’ll It Be? and
many have enjoyed Dave’s various albums too. Interesting that
Dave is a fine guitarist but on your album he’s playing bass
and B3 to name a couple instruments.
Barry Ollman: Dave is a jewel. He’s such a musical guy
and I rarely have to explain anything to him when he’s doing
that engineering thing. Whenever I say, see if you can… (fill
in the blank) he’s already working on it! He’s definitely
one of my favorite guitarists too. Jimmy Page was knocked out by his
playing! He’s great on anything with strings. He also has that
old Hammond B3 and Leslie cabinet in his studio and he’s not
afraid to use it! We work really well together and it always feels
like there’s a very low ego quotient between us.
mwe3: Which What’ll It Be? tracks are getting the
most airplay on radio and do you have some personal favorites? The
lead off track, with Graham Nash on backing vocals is excellent. What
was the inspiration behind “Imogen’s Lament”?
Barry
Ollman: I’ve been getting a fair amount of airplay in Europe
and the tracks that seem to get the most attention are “Imogen’s
Lament” (thanks again, Graham!), “See Ya in Okemah”,
“The Other Half”, “Something To Say” and “Banker’s
Holiday”. Side note: a lot of women have told me that they really
love “Lean In Close” and I do too… My brother Rick
calls it my “adult love song”.
As for “Imogen’s Lament”, it began to take shape following
a conversation I had with my photographer brother, Arthur, regarding
a phone conversation he had in the seventies with the master photographer
Imogen Cunningham. Incidentally, I originally met Graham through Arthur
who was, at the time, the director of the Museum of Photographic Arts
in San Diego. He did that for 23 years!
Arthur had known Imogen and we both loved her images, of course. I
wrote the song as an affectionate homage to her life and work. While
I took certain liberties with her story, I do like the feeling we
captured of a person who has spent a full lifetime making amazing
artwork and finishes her career just as a whole new era arrives. In
fact, when Imogen passed away at 93 in 1976, the personal computer
and integrated circuits and microprocessors were just beginning to
see the light of day and photography would be changed forever. “Now
there’s hundreds of millions. One in every phone…”
I recorded the song with Dave up in Loveland, and the sessions
went really well. Some people probably don’t know that Graham
was a photographer before he was a musician and making and collecting
photography has been one of his lifelong passions. Check out his photography
if you’re not familiar with it. It’s world class… Anyway,
I sent the basic mix to him and he got right back to me. He told me
I’d written a great song and that I shouldn’t finish my
record until he’d sung on it! All I remember is that I floated
a few inches off the ground for a few days after that. With his schedule,
it took a few years to get into the studio with him but he kept reminding
me to wait for it to happen. I was very patient and the story even
gets better…
The night we recorded his vocal tracks in Boulder, I took a wrong
turn and got us thoroughly lost driving to the studio, and when he
saw a road sign that said Exit Zero, he said it would make
a great song and did I want to write it with him. I waited for perhaps
a tenth of a second and said YES! We spent a couple of weeks going
back and forth with our various ideas for music and lyrics and eventually
wound up working on the song with CSN’s other tremendous guitarist,
Shane Fontayne. Shane changed the feel of the song pretty dramatically,
changed some chords around and generally created a groove that Graham
enjoyed singing to. I love it and I’ve since had the great thrill
of watching Crosby, Stills & Nash performing a song that I helped
write. Living the dream, as they say…
mwe3: How about the song “Banker’s Holiday”?
It’s a real driving rocker and it has some cutting edge lyrics
that really make your hair stand up on the back of your neck. What
motivated the ideas behind that track?
Barry
Ollman: I spent many years working in the financial world at a
distinctly non-master of the universe level and I always tried to
be honest and ethical in my approach to the business. When the economy
started to come undone around 2008, largely at the expense of the
fabled 99%, I just felt more and more pissed every time I turned on
the news. I’ve since learned to watch less television. Anyway,
I know a fair amount about the history of “protest songs”
and if this didn’t deserve to get its own song, I don’t
know what would. The thought of all these multi-national bank CEO’s
living like pharaohs, while countless millions of people have to choose
between food and medicine and rent. Well, that’s where the song
comes from.
This might be a good moment to mention Woody Guthrie. For the past
thirty years, I’ve led a whole other parallel life as a pretty
serious collector of rare letters and autograph material. My main
focus has been on American Social Movements from 1920 to 1970, primarily
through music and literature. I love underdogs! No Nazis and no baseball
players…
Sometime late in the 1980’s, I stumbled on one of Woody’s
handwritten letters and some little light went on in my head. Since
then, I’ve been very fortunate to have put together the biggest
private collection of Woody’s papers and artworks and I can’t
begin to tell you what the whole experience has meant to me. Woody
was a true American genius and his output in nearly every mode of
expression was absolutely enormous.
My fascination with Woody also led me to many of the people that were
drawn to him, like Lead Belly, Pete Seeger and of course, Bob Dylan.
That Woody circle is an ever widening one and for socially conscious
musicians and artists, he sits right at the root of a very large tree,
if you know what I mean. I’d say he is one of those strong,
deep roots and any young musician would do very well to study Woody
Guthrie. I guess I would say that “Banker’s Holiday”
pretty much came right out of the Woody Guthrie Center in my brain.
I think Dylan said something like, “you could listen to his music
and learn how to live!” Woody was very unafraid and I really
admire that fiery clarity that poured out of him.
Pardon the cliché, but he was a true champion of the little
guy… If someone out there would like an introduction to Woody,
I’d suggest that they read his wonderful book Bound For Glory
or Ed Cray’s biography Ramblin’ Man or even download
Bob Dylan’s “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie”, a seven
minute recording of the only time he ever read a poem on stage. It
was at his first major concert in NY, outside of the coffee houses,
at Town Hall on April 12th, 1963 and it’s incredibly powerful.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to throw in a comment about
song writing in general… Obviously, there are as many methods
and techniques as there are songwriters and no one method is right
or wrong. A lot of great writers are highly disciplined about the
craft of song writing. Some write a song every day. Some write a song
every Saturday or whatever. Woody often wrote ten songs a day! No
kidding… I don’t think he could help it!
Aside from Woody, my understanding of that sort of highly focused
behavior is that it may be about keeping the ideas flowing and avoiding
getting lazy about it all. I just want to say, that’s not me.
I’m not bragging about this but I often go along, very happily,
not writing a song for months, and then when I do feel that I have
something coming through that I believe needs saying, I just try to
be ready. I know that I miss a bunch of them but I feel pretty strongly
about the ones I do get. And, of course, I probably am lazy…
mwe3:
What are your instruments of choice when it comes to writing music?
From the sound of your playing on the CD, it’s clear that you’re
a very underrated guitarist as well. I guess anyone that can hold
their own with top guys like Dave Beegle has to know how to play!
Tell us about your favorite guitars and the guitars you play on What’ll
It Be?
Barry Ollman: Thanks. I mainly write on an acoustic 6 string
guitar, either my 1966 Guild D40 that my dad bought me, brand new,
on my 13th birthday or my Martin, Graham Nash Signature model that
I got from Graham. Both are amazing instruments and bring out different
elements in my playing.
Speaking of amazing instruments, any electric 12 string that you hear
on this record would be my 1966 Rickenbacker (330/12) which was a
gift from Henry Gross. It plays like a dream and sounds ridiculously
perfect. That guitar, played through Dave’s vintage Vox amps,with
an occasional big old Marshall thrown in, is pure ear candy to me.
Sometimes I think that the fact that the four Beatles met when they
did, and chose the specific instruments they chose, to make it sound
like that, is all I need to prove that there is a God. It can’t
possibly be a coincidence! Just listen to “You Can’t Do
That” or “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl.” Think
about it…
By the way, if you listen to my song “The Other Half”, pretty
loud, and check out the part that goes “I’m walking,
I’m running, I’m standing still”. That’s the Rick
12 that’s chunking along during that section. It was really loud
and sort of glorious that day in the studio…
mwe3: I was reading about your early childhood years. Where
did you grow up and where do you live now? Also how amazing was it
that your dad was the Midwest correspondent for Billboard during the
heyday of pop music history? I would read Billboard and Cashbox religiously
every week during the 1960s as my dad owned restaurants in Midtown
Manhattan so back then, there was never a shortage of great music
to find at Sam Goody and all the other great music stores back then!
Do you wish you could back in time 50 years ago and go through all
of this again? How do you keep your memory alive and burnished when
you think about your dad and all the great music that happened during
your lifetime?
Barry Ollman: I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. What I mean
is, to the extent that I grew up, I did it there… Even when I
was a kid I thought it was really cool that my dad wrote for Billboard
magazine. I raced home from school every Monday afternoon to read
the Top 100! We had stacks of old issues in the basement. There were
other benefits of his work as well. For instance, when he took my
brother Rick and I to see The Jimi Hendrix Experience with The Soft
Machine in February of 1968 and we had great 4th row Center seats.
That changed the brain of this 14 year old, right there. Trust me…
My whole family was, and always has been, very musical and respectful
of the arts in general. I think that sort of gave me permission to
explore my creative side which I consider a major gift for any young
person to receive. Oh yeah, and I’ve lived in the Denver area
for 40 some years now…
mwe3: What else do you have on the front burner and back burner
for the next year or so? What will your next album sound like and
how far down the road are you on the follow up to What’ll
It Be? What other activities are present in your mind as far as
what you want to accomplish this coming year?
Barry Ollman: I’ll get back to your questions but I should
probably give you a piece of background information here… I had
actually just finished mastering this record, and designing the cover
art, in early October of 2012 and I’d been doing a bunch of traveling
and was mostly feeling pretty good. I did notice that my arms had
been feeling “heavy” but I didn’t pay too much attention
to it. I remember that time very clearly as our friends Parker Millsap
and John Fullbright were in Denver for a show at The Bluebird Theater
and they were staying at our house for a few days. The next week I
went out to DC for Woody Guthrie’s 100th Birthday event at The
Kennedy Center and that following Sunday I was sitting on the couch
with my wife, Judy, when she asked how I was feeling. That’s
when I uttered what would have been some great famous last words,
“I feel pretty good right now”. Then my eyes rolled up in
my head and I went into total cardiac arrest! I mean dead. She called
911 and to my great good fortune, the guys at South Metro Fire #31,
who are one mile from our house, were not otherwise engaged. They
got to me in five minutes, and with no time to spare, moved the furniture,
cut my shirt off and defibrillated me three separate times, and once
more in the ambulance when they felt they were losing me. I’ve
got some amazing pictures of those bruises! All colors… Of course,
other than the photos, all of this is hearsay to me as I was totally
gone at the time.
The short
version of all this is that I spent eight days in the hospital, the
first three of which I was chilled down and kept in an induced coma
in an attempt to reduce any damage to my heart. In retrospect, I like
to think that I simply had a plumbing problem and my timing was really
good! They do say that people who go through what I went through,
a V-Fib or Ventricular Fibrillation, in the home, have about a 3-8%
chance of survival! I’m told my nurses kept calling me miracle
man. I’ve taken several gift baskets over to the fire station
since then and they’re always glad to see me because, as they
say, “we lose most of ‘em”!
These days I feel great, and very grateful! By the way, on my last
day in the hospital, I looked up to see Graham walking into the room
carrying a really cool black leather CSN tour jacket. He likes to
blow my mind and he did that day. My mom and Judy and our daughters
all knew he was coming but they kept their poker faces… He flew
in from LA to give me a little love and encouragement and of course,
my family adores him. It made for a great conclusion to a very unusual
week, one that was much scarier for everyone else than it was for
me.
Now, back to the music… I’d say I spent a good nine months
healing up and coming to terms with what I’d been through before
I even thought about doing anything with the record. Then one day,
I put on some head phones and gave it a good listen. I was pleasantly
surprised to feel that not only did the songs still resonate with
me, but I really enjoyed listening to them. I guess I had a basic
“life’s too short to be wasting time” kind of moment,
because I immediately wanted to put the record out, if for no other
reason than to have a tangible way to thank the very large number
of friends and family who rallied around me when this happened. I’ll
tell you, I’ve mailed out a lot of CDs with handwritten thank
you notes and I meant each one. The whole thing went from being a
big blast of artistic expression to an expression of gratitude! That
works for me…
Interestingly, I had just finished recording and mixing the song “Almost
Time”, maybe a month or so before my heart episode, and I placed
it last on the album. Now I think of it as having some of the more
ironic lyrics on the record. “I hear her calling out to me
tonight. It’s almost time, but not quite…”
fits pretty well and I really like the bridge that says “When
I was young, the road was long and wide ahead. But as I’ve travelled,
I feel I’m standing on a golden thread”. It’s taken
on all sorts of new meaning for me.
As for that “road ahead” stuff… It’s taken me
a while to get back to song writing but I have been writing lately
and I’m starting to think about how I’d like to produce
my next tracks. I’m working on an interesting compilation project
with three terrific singer/songwriters that will be coming out next
year. I’ve also been doing a little work with my old friend Doug
McGinnis’s on some of his new tracks up at Far & Away Studios
in Boulder, Colorado. The studio is a real beauty, by the way. My
friend Geoff Gray, the owner, worked with Les Paul for many years.
He has some of Les’s old equipment in the studio and a hell of
a lot of funny stories…
Back to that follow up record… In this past month, a few friends
of mine kindly offered to pitch in on some recordings and they are
some of my favorite musicians working today. I’m definitely getting
excited again but I can’t push these things. Actually, I suppose
I could, but I don’t think it works that well for me to make
music that way. I like it better when it comes to me…
Thanks to Barry Ollman @ www.BarryOllman.com
and to Peter Holmstedt @ www.hemifran.com
