My 14th album was inspired by the “Cuttin’ Grass” albums by one of my current favorite musicians, Sturgill Simpson (aka, Johnny Blue Skies). The goal of the project was to create a set of songs I had previously recorded over the past few years, and to reimagine them as performed by an Americana band with fiddles, banjos, and more lyrical twang. The songs would have more of a common “vibe” to them as a result. Rearranging and remastering these songs also allow me to employ new features to my primary DAW, Apple Logic, and to use new techniques I’ve learned since I originally recorded these tracks. The long term goal is to eventually assemble a band and play these songs live in front of an audience. Most of them are from the albums where I intentionally tried to be a classic Texas singer songwriter – Tales from Topographic Texas and It’s on With the Show.
There’s also a few new songs. “A Possum in the Dark” was inspired by the career of George Jones, the greatest voice in Country Music history, and one of its most tragic stories. “Mocha Mousse Dreams” was written at the end of the year as I sat down to write my annual Christmas letter. to friends and family, and realized that I had spent almost half the year focused on taking care of Mom.
…After the creative whirlwind that drove me to finish the set of music inspired by our trip to Tanzania (“the first from below“) in just a few weeks…this has been a more liesurely project, and one I don’t think I’ll ever finish because I will continue to go back to the catalog and look for songs which are good candidates for performing live one day.
NOTE: With this project, I haven’t released the “completed” tracks to the music streamers like Spotify and Apple, because I’m certain I’ll keep tweaking them for the forseeable future. I also didn’t use the original music videos I created for the tracks, and I haven’t created any new ones. The purpose was to focus exclusively on the music.