I’m very excited to release my first new album in a year and a half. It’s called Recalibration, which is also the title of the first track. Its 15 songs include 5 instrumentals and 10 with vocals.
Click these links to go right to the album on some of the major platforms.
Spotify
Apple Music
Pandora
Amazon Music
Here’s a track from it, “I’m Sorry for Saying I’m Sorry.” It’s a rocker. Hope you like it.
And here’s a song-by-song description:
- Recalibration is my take on late 60s psychedelic rock, which I have loved for decades. It has oblique lyrics, a Beatles-inspired guitar riff, sitar, Penny Laine-inspired trumpet, and mellotron.
- I’m Sorry for Saying I’m Sorry is a punk rocker is about our cultural obsession with saying sorry all the time. The insecure conflicted guy in the song has put himself into an endless loop of apologies.
- Up In Neff’s Canyon is an Americana ballad about living a few minutes’ walk from a spectacular canyon in the Wasatch Mountains.
- Snowfall is a peaceful instrumental I wrote \ watching the snow fall outside my house.
- Lifeline is a funky rocker about a guy who knows that his happy life will end someday and is trying to cut a deal with the Grim Reaper to keep it going.
- Quantize Me is robotic electro-pop about quantization, which is what you do in music recording when you want to reduce natural variation in the timing of a performance. This strange tool in modern music tech inspired me to explore the idea of applying quantizing to reduce the natural variation of human behavior.
- Five Four Glide is the first odd-meter instrumental I’ve written and recorded since my days with the Wayward Monks. It’s inspired by early 70s jazz fusion from Miles Davis, King Crimson, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
- Lumination High is an upbeat indie rocker that celebrates the joys of creating things.
- Onward is in a traditional jazz style that features trumpet as the lead instrument. It has a lot of chord changes, a swinging beat, and my son Ian on piano. I put strings in the middle to build its emotionality.
- Privacy is a funky number inspired by songs like Low Rider by War. It’s another of my satirical songs about dehumanizing technology, following Virtuality, Email Hell, and Incognito. This time, it’s about a guy who wants to go off the grid, away from social media and their algorithms.
- Drama is a fast lo-fi country rocker inspired by the White Stripes and Creedence Clearwater Revival. The guy in the song wants to get away from all the drama around him. It’s meant to be funny and takes the idea of drama to its extremes.
- Take It has three different parts. The first part is like a jig, the second part is an insistent riff played in frequently changing keys, and the third is a minor key piano-centered ballad. It features a lot of melodic interplay between my son Ian on piano and me on guitar
- Words is a retro-sounding bluesy song about the good and bad power of words. It starts with a quiet night-clubby piano and bass and builds into a more driving jazzy tune with a trumpet solo. My main musical inspiration on this one is Randy Newman
- Meander With Me has an airy Latin jazzy vibe, with lots of nylon-string guitar playing. I came up with this one after listening to some of Burt Bacharach’s songs with their clever melodic phrasing and jazzy chord changes. One day on a hike, I got to thinking about the joys of meandering from place to place without a path in mind.
- Procession is an homage to lead guitar-centered instrumental power ballads by bands like Genesis (when Steve Hackett was the guitarist), Procol Harum (when Robin Trower was the guitarist) Santana, Joe Satriani, and Jeff Beck. I thought it would sound cool to end the album with this one, right after the minimalism of Meander With Me. In the middle of Procession, I suspend the bombast with a modal jam containing choppy electric piano chords, busy bass lines, and bended guitar notes.
RECALIBRATION REVIEWS: