Beautiful World (Part One)

First, I'm not going in order of the album, but in order of the songs being written, because there is a story there. "Beautiful World" is a song that bridges two worlds. One world is Louisville, Kentucky my the summer after I graduated high school and the other is Kenyon college my freshman year. I began the song in one world, but I finished it in the other. There is an ephemeral quality to that moment in time.  One part of my life was over, but the next had yet to begin.

There was a cascade of characters popping in and out of my life at that moment. My band Satori was recording an album. I was really proud of the work that we were doing, but it wasn't clear if we would every play together after the Summer. Our bass player, Becky, was moving to Michigan. I had asked another friend, Matt Frederick, to join, to soften up the sound.  Meanwhile I was working two jobs to help pay for school. I was teaching a video class with my friend Amy, and I was working at the Courier Journal selling subscriptions.

The chronology of the events of that summer is difficult to piece together all these years later, but many of the moments stand out.  I began a brief love affair with a gal named Jo.  She was also in a transient moment in her life. What made it particularly surreal was the fact that I had had a crush on her when I was in first grade.  This gave the relationship a kind of culminating effect. Like any love affair there were nights of heatfelt openness, but she kind of disappeared in the middle of the summer, and the relationship didn't quite end. It just dissipated into the ether. There is a lot of her in this song.

But the beautiful world that I reference in the song were the circles that I was wondering in and out of, and not feeling at place in. I remember one moment that summer when I was at a house that Jason Noble and Jeff Mueller lived in. I ran into a woman that I had tried unsuccessfully to date in high school, and I had told her as much months earlier, but she was with some other guy. I felt stingingly out of place.

Another moment I remember fondly was on a particularly long day.  I had managed to get myself fired from the Courier Journal, because I had my days wrong. I walked from downtown to the Highlands where my friend Amy lived. We were walking around, and my friend Carrie Cooper spotted me and pulled over and invited me to a dinner in Westport, Kentucky. I accepted, and I was whisked away. It was an unusual night. These were not people that I spent a lot of time with, but I had been floating in and out of myself that summer, and as I say, I was moving in and out of circles. The house I had been brought to was on the river, and I remember having a quiet dinner and watching as a barge floated silently by. It seemed like a beautiful world, but one that I didn't belong in.

The summer came to an end, and I found myself at Kenyon College for my freshman year. There was a ceremony for the incoming freshman class, and I remembered seeing a guy with a kind of mohawk pony-tail in a robe carrying a banner for the convocation (it turned out to be Dave Le Compte).  Something about seeing this punk-rock looking guy in a formal robe struck a chord with me. He seemed a symbol of the two different worlds at that moment.

I don't know when I started writing that song, but I know that I finished it in my dorm room in Lewis. It was like the first week of school, I think. I brought that transience with me, and I found myself moving in and out of social settings a lot.  It was a very exciting time, but I also felt socially awkward too. For some reason I would be hanging out with a group of people and I would feel this painful sense of being out of place, and I had to leave, but then when I left I would feel a sense of loss like I should go back.  I didn't feel settled in a group, and I didn't feel settled when I was alone.

I suppose part of it was that I had been thrown out of a routine that I had understood into a new routine that I was just starting to make out. That was around the time that I started going by Dewey.  Dewey was already a nickname, but it hadn't yet become my name. I began introducing myself as Dewey, because it gave me a persona to hide behind. I could be me without having to be me. Plus, I might half a dozen Andrews in the first week.

Another part, though, was that I didn't feel like I belonged in college at all. I truly believed that I was on the wrong path. I was supposed to be pursuing music, and not in school for four more years.  I didn't exactly know how to escape, and I felt like the amazing person I had become over the many years of high school was gone, and nothing had come to replace him. I was an actor playing the part of Dewey Kincade, and I hadn't written all the words yet. It was a feeling that would last all year.

About the recording:

Jeff Faith: Upright Bass
Tonya Buckler: Backing vocals
Steve Sizemore: Percussion

This is one of the few tracks I recorded in New York that survived the crash of my hard drive. I don't know why I had backed it up all by itself.  By the time I got around to this one I ended up re-recording a lot of it (and adding Steve, Tonya, and Jeff).  I spent a lot of time on the slide part, but only because I'm not a slide player. A good slide player would have nailed it in one or two takes. Sigh.

Originally, I sang backup with myself on all the words, but when I brought Tonya in to sing, she nixed that idea.  She said it didn't feel right, and she was right. This is why it's great to work with musicians who are also songwriters.  They tend to hear what they are doing as serving the song, and they won't do it, if it doesn't serve the song.

Victims of the Moon: The Personnel

I just wanted to give a shout out to the folks who made this album awesome.

Steve Sizemore: He was the first outside help I sought on this recording. Our daughters skate together for the Louisville Skating Academy.  That's how we came to know each other, despite the fact that I'd heard Steve play with Appalatin many times.  We played together as the Fellow Travelers, and he has always been easy to work with. I didn't give him a single direction for this recording. I would just play the song, and he would pick a percussion instrument.  I'd hit record, and in one take we'd have Steve's contribution. I tried to get Steve to play on more songs, and he would listen and say "that song doesn't need anything."  Even though he didn't play on those songs, he provided an important service. I wouldn't have believed they were complete unless Steve said so.

Jeffrey Faith: Jeff is another Fellow Traveler. I'd seen him play before, but Tonya Buckler encouraged our getting together many years ago.  I think the very definition of mensch in the dictionary has Jeff in it.  At any rate, I know how to play bass, but on an acoustic album isn't upright bass really cool?  I had Jeff come in for a session, and we banged out three songs. It was pretty clear that Jeff needed to play on every song, and he did. In three sessions. Jeff is the kind of guy who plays three gigs in a week before flying off to Topeka to work on an airplane before coming home to work on his own business (Fehr's Beer).  I guess it's true what they say.  If you want somebody to get the job done ask a busy man.

Tonya Buckler: Or woman. Tonya has a lot of irons in the fire. Of everybody on this list, I've known her the longest, though we only had a very peripheral acquaintance for many years.  We struck up a conversation many years ago at one of Danny Flanigan's gigs at Clifton's, and when I began to look for a singer for the Fellow Travelers, I sought her out, and I'm glad I did. She always did her homework. She was ready to play her part (lead vocal, banjo, guitar or percussion).  It wasn't until this album that I was able to listen to her singing in isolation. For most of our working relationship I'd only hear Tonya as I was singing. While I was mixing, I discovered a different side to Tonya's singing. She's spot on, for one. For another, she was easy to work with, and she's easy to fit into a mix.

Morgan Brooks: I produced two of Morgan's albums, and I had always enjoyed working with her. I had originally hoped that Tonya would sing all the backing vocals, but Tonya was stretched thin. As I went through my list of possible singers, I mentioned Morgan's name to my wife, and she said, "She should be at the top of the list."  And I had that sort of, well, duh, moment. Morgan was happy to help out, and I'm thrilled to hear her singing again.  I can't wait to hear her next album.

Glad to Be Alive

I wrote this song the summer after I had moved back to Louisville from new York. I had returned that winter, and I was so busy putting the finishing touches on Who Are the Navigators. By the time summer rolled around, I had nothing to do but wait for the CDs to arrive. I got reacquainted with a woman I had known several years back. She was in town for a performance, and she needed someone to drive her around (or something like that). We'll call her Tina. 

I had spent probably the last 8 years in an on-again off again relationship with a gal (we'll call her Ramona). Ramona lived in New York, and I had moved back to Louisville to escape the relationship on some level.  I was having a great time writing songs. I wrote "Get Out of Touch", "Here Comes the Hurricane", "Just Getting Started", "Take it for a Ride" and many others I hope to release some day. My point is, I had gotten over Ramona, but I had never learned how to date. How do single people meet each other? 

Well, Tina showed up, and I felt like I could hope again. It made me feel, well, glad to be alive. Of course, she was back on the road within a week. What I didn't realize at the time was that that moment was really the zenith of that relationship. My songwriter-self knew. Over the years, I've come to learn that my songwriter self is waaaay smarter and wiser than I am. In fact, I've often questioned whether I write any of my songs, because I'm not that smart. The words that I wrote were right on the money:

And though she'll disappear into the great unknown

And I might have to walk on through the valley of stone

I am not alone

No I will survive

My songwriter-self knew that this chance encounter didn't end with the couple living happily ever after. She did disappear, and I was alone, but I survived. The true gift of that moment in time was that I had been liberated from a toxic relationship with Ramona. I was truly independent.

At any rate, The Navigators were in the studio for the album that became Glory, Glory. Everyone decided that a solo acoustic song might be nice to fill out the album, so one day I played a bunch of songs love in the studio.  That's where this recording came from. Andrew Emer said we should put it on the album, because it was one of the few happy songs, which it was. But it didn't make the cut. 

The funny thing is that as we were wrapping up Glory, Glory, we had an opportunity to play Bowery Ballroom, which we did. It was one of my favorite shows. The band said that I should play, "Glad to Be Alive" by myself. That was quite a moment for me. There I was all alone onstage in front of thousands of people. I think I nailed it, but I was out of my body at the time.  Tina was there too. I hope she got the thank you. 

Now when I hear the song, I hear it very differently. I'm a father, and I think of my daughter disappearing into the great unknown (someday). It's hard to imagine, honestly, but I think I will survive. 

Run to the Rock

This song was written the same day I wrote "One Line Epitaph." Read that post for more context. That was a productive day. I had tried to write a very different song that was personal, but I found that version boring. It creates a lot of pressure to be interesting, and I suppose to some people I am, but not to me. Sisyphus? Now that's an interesting character. For some reason, I had a paperback copy of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus with me in Inwood. I always like Camus. Something about his idea of the absurd hero appealed to me. I wrote songs about his books The Plague and The Stranger. Not many authors have inspired me like that.

While I understood that Camus was arguing that Sisyphus has no choice but to see meaning in his mission of pushing the rock up the hill, I wanted to tell the story from the inside. What would it be like? What would such a figure be like?

Camus suggests that Sisyphus was most interesting as he walked down hill having watched the giant rock roll back down. He knew it would happen. He goes to push it back down hill. Now is his moment of reflection. How does he make sense of his toil?

What interested me most about the story is how timeless it felt.  It was both ancient and modern. It was an essential expression of what it meant to be human. I loved the fact that in my song Sisyphus refuses to ever repent even it meant ending his toil.  He would rather spend eternity pushing a rock up the hill then to give an all-powerful god the one power that only he has: free-will.

At any rate, I got Andrew Emer to record a version- just the two of us. We recorded a couple of songs for a holiday CD. I gave Phelim one, and he thought that it should be a Navigators song, which I hadn't expected. We occasionally played it live, but it was a real campfire song that stood out in our more raucous sets. Ultimately, we ended up recording it for the Cowboy Sessions at Glory, Glory. We ended up nixing the song, because we weren't happy about the ending.

As I was looking at the Navigators material this year, I had originally sought to not try to rejigger the songs, but I had since re-recorded a version for myself, and I was much happier with the end. It was a loop of the chorus over and over again and a fade out. So I took the original mix, copied and pasted the ending, and then added some more vocals, and an organ. Of all the tracks that I re-released here, this is the one I fiddled with the most. I don't know if I solved the problem of the ending, because unlike the other tracks, I can't listen to it with the same objectivity. I suppose my own Sisyphean task would be to record the same song over and over. Interesting how I wrote "Run to the Rock" and "One Line Epitaph" on the same day.

Get Out of Touch

This song is loaded with meaning. I started writing this song when I was living with my band, Satori. I was 21. It was 1995. My girlfriend's brother, who became my good friend had to be hospitalized in a mental hospital. It was the first of many such hospitalizations for him. Brian was a fiercely brilliant and independent thinker. He and Andrew Lee had produced my first recording with my band Satori. We spent a week in their house/studio, and we had a lot of fun working on that album.

It was about a year later when Brian was hospitalized. That's when I got the chorus in my head. The song didn't go anywhere. It wasn't until after I had gone back to college, spent a year in Brooklyn, only to return home. While I was finishing up Who are the Navigators, I wrote the next two verses and the bridge. The Louisville Navigators began to play the song. I later recorded a version for Lost and Found, but I wasn't happy with it. I don't know what was missing.

It wasn't until Lost and Found was recorded that I wrote the third verse. I wasn't sure if it needed it or not. Sometimes I play it, sometimes I don't.  I recorded this version with Phelim and Andrew at Graham Hawthorne's studio.  We continued to tinker with this song, and we played it a variety of different ways.

When I listen to this song, I find it hard to believe that I wrote it twenty years ago. It is unfortunately, still very current. Maybe it's gotten more relevant over the years. It's the last lines that I repeat to myself over and over in life: It's so simple it's hard. The answers to our problems aren't complicated, they don't require a PhD in human understanding. They're just hard to do, because they require courage.

Russian Roulette

I wrote this song in Washington Heights. After having broken up with my girlfriend, and couch-surfed, I landed in Brooklyn. I spent about a year there, and I didn't get much writing done. The Navigators were beginning to tour, and we were playing bigger clubs in New York City. I began demoing every song that I had written, so the band could hear all the material, and I guess I didn't have a lot to say.  I had gone through a "poor pitiful me" period, and I had written enough break-up songs. 

I heard that my ex-girlfriend's boyfriend had gotten beaten up on the A train.  I thought, "You take a chance on a midnight train," and that line immediately made me think there was a song there. By the end of the day, I had written the song. I think the song was in our repertoire within a month. Within a couple of months, we were recording the song at Cowboy Technical for the album that became Glory, Glory. Honestly, there was a full length album that was never released.  I didn't even put all the tracks on Meet the Navigators... Again, because no one has a copy of them. 

I always thought, and hoped that album would have been released in all its, um, glory, but despite spending thousands of dollars recording a full length album, we didn't release one. It reminds me of the old saying, "One boy, one brain; two boys, half a brain; three boys, no brain at all."  Parents understand that saying. To be fair to the band, the label was also trying to shape the album, and they sent us down a few dead ends as well. Sometimes when the stakes get high, you can't make good choices. I find it ironic that we didn't pull the trigger on this one. 

In My Time of Darkness

This song was written shortly after 9/11.  It has a lot of that day in it, but it really is a portrait of my life before and after. It is both largely fictitious, and as true as any song that I have written. In my mind, there is a video for this song, because the images are very clear, and they correspond with the words, but not in the way that you might think. 

Yes, I started out in Memphis, which might be a code for Louisville, which to people in New York City at the time (like me), could be interchangeable.  But the Memphis I had in mind was Egypt. See, I saw my soul and life as a continuation of previous lives. Not based on some scientific fact, or religious creed, but on some personal feeling. Spiritual or Freudian? I'm not sure. I ended up in Dallas, which is a strange place, because I had never been there, though my family had been there before I was born. 

"Walls crashed all around me," was a direct reference to 9/11 as were the next two lines. I was broke. I bought things using a credit card that I had no means of paying off. I was in New York City after 9/11 and I had no job, and I had no leg to stand on and no truth to set me free. Which sounds like the point in the blog where you bemoan your very existence, and why you are so cursed to be the person you are, but instead the song shows a bright side, because in my time of darkness there was something that pulled me through. 

You could easily interpret the chorus to be about a woman who comes and saves the day. It's a love song, right? But in my mind, the "she" in question was not an earthly woman, but a feminine manifestation of god. I was always impressed that Phelim with his celtic heritage knew this implicitly. It's a shame that some people understand the divine through one particular gender, and that gender is typically male. There's nothing wrong with the male divine, but it's only half the picture. I was raised in the world of the masculine divine, but then I read The Mists of Avalon, and I developed a genuine connection to the concept.

The second verse talks about "rifling through the Keys," which is a reference to my moving to Key West after college in the hopes that my band might "make it", but I was not in a place to make anything. Then the song talks about how the "world around me, brought me to my knees," and that is a reference to having cancer, and little finding myself crawling on my knees after gigs, because of the pain. 

The next two lines are simply two of the lines I am most proudest of:

God seemed cold and distant; like an ice-capped mountainside

Carried the mark of Cain on me, and had no place to hide.

See, I was/am a flawed person, and that made me feel bad about myself. I had the mark of Cain. And the male God was a very distant one for me, but the female one, was there in my time of darkness. I understand as a history teacher why early cultures revered the Mother Goddess before they had a thought about the God the Father. 

Of course, the Mother isn't all hugs and kisses. Read The Mists of Avalon and you'll understand. At any rate, the second verse is about me personally. "When I think upon the many things I've tried," is about how I was thinking about me trying to be a successful musician. and how when I saw "the world that could have been" I was always saddened. As much as the pull of being an artist would rock my boat up and down, and it seemed to never settle, I knew that "still without that vision, I knew I'd disappear."

Still, the frustrations would mount. I would "stand close to exhaustion" and I would fail. Again and again, I failed. But when I was being my most spiritual self, I wouldn't look towards my "evil twin" and I wouldn't lose the woman who was the earthly symbol of the divine force that moves the universe. I did, but the sentiment still is valid. 

We recorded this at Threshold studios, and in my opinion, this is the best thing that we recorded there, but this is the most personal thing that we recorded there. The performance with Andrew and Phelim doesn't try to hard. We took "Here Comes the Hurricane", "Just Getting Started", and "One Line Epitaph" and we took those songs to 11, but this song we played at the number that it was. I'll let you decide what number it is. 

One Line Epitaph

This was a song that was in nearly every Navigators set list. We often closed with it. We used to call it "One Line Overplayed." Don't get me wrong. I think it's a great song, but I do find it ironic that we were often summed up by one song that was about not summing things up.  

This song started with a guitar rift that was easy to play over and over. I had recently started playing plucking a lot of songs on guitar instead of strumming. I had started it with "Take it for a Ride" and continued with "Hold On" and then "One Line Epitaph." I was inspired to play in this style by Danny Flanigan, who did a lot of finger plucking (and did it better).  As much as I liked the music, I couldn't find the words for the song. 

One day (and I wish I could tell you more about that day, but it was otherwise unventful), I wrote three songs. This was one of them. I can't recall if completing this song allowed me to write two new ones, or whether writing two new songs gave me the momentum to finish this song. Again, this didn't seem like a particularly eventful day.  I was living in Inwood at the time with my girlfriend, though she was out of town. She was out of town a lot, and while I was trying to find regular employment, I had come to discover that people in their late 20s aren't as exciting to employers as people in their early 20s. 

People used to joke about how quickly I could get a job. "What? Dewey got home? He'll have a job at the end of the day."  I found myself going to the pizzaria to buy a slice with spare change.  The one good thing about being unemployed is that you have time to write, and I did. 

One thing that had been floating in my mind for some time is the fact that in the music business you have to easily identified. I wasn't very good at that. In fact, the people that I was most interested in, like Bob Dylan, had reinvented themselves several times over. Neil Young was a folksy singer, but then he played grungy music with Crazy Horse. He was a solo artist, but then he released a widely successful album with Crosby, Stills and Nash. Me, I wrote all kinds of music. Folk, pop, rock, and some really weird stuff. And yet, I was always told that I needed to present myself as one thing. I probably should have listened, but I approached songs with an attitude that you shouldn't censor yourself.  That meant that I wrote songs very quickly (sometimes), but it also meant that what came out didn't necessarily fit into an easily identifiable pattern.

After the release of Who Are The Navigators and Lost and Found, I had been constantly asked what my signature sound was going to be, and I could never answer that question. I hated to be limited in that way. "One Line Epitaph" was about that feeling of not wanting to be summed up. I wanted to be like people are- multi-faceted. If anything, that was what defined me as an artist.

At the same time, it's not just about the music industry. Aren't we all being pigeon-holed at one time or another? Aren't people often resorting to their first obvious impressions of the world? We want simple boxes (grids) that we can check off instead of mysteries (oceans) that we might never solve. If I was a riddle, I didn't want to be solved. 

I think my relationship at the time also fed this idea. I was very much attracted to a person who seemed to want to define who I was, and I didn't want that. Of course, I might be guilty of the same thing. It's hard to say. 

At any rate, we played this song for a while in the version that on Meet the Navigators. I think both Phelim and Andrew felt that there needed to be more. Andrew pushed for a kind of "structural solo" and that became the instrumental interlude that led to the "Love, Hallejuha, yeah" refrain, which I think Phelim may have actually come up with. The song ultimately became epic, if you listen to the version on Glory, Glory. I like that version, but I also kind of like the original version. We recorded it again, and again, and I hope that the other versions see the light of day. Even the song can't be summed up. 

The song made it's way into the movie Dream Riders, but it was never released as a single, because it was a ballad (for at least part of the song). Structurally, the song doesn't follow normal song patterns either. I couldn't even tell you if its finished. Years later when I had moved back to Louisville for good (presumably), I ran into Brian Cronin, who mentioned that the song had really reached him at an impressionable time in his life. I ended up playing with him in a band, and I think a lot of it has do with his telling me that. Songs have a life of their own. 

Here Comes the Hurricane

Here Comes the Hurricane

When I was a senior in college, I read an article about global warming in the New Yorker.  This was around 1996. One of the effects predicted by the article was that hurricanes would get stronger.  A couple of years later I was living in Louisville.  This was around the time that I wrote "Just Getting started", so read that post for more background. At any rate, Hurricane Mitch was at that point the deadliest hurricane in history and it killed thousands in Central America. I think the final number was 11,000 fatalities. You might not remember this, because Bill Clinton was being impeached.

I was in a strange place at that point in my life. I had been having strange vivid dreams. In one there was a crazy man in Pakistan that was about to start World War III. I also had cancer, and didn't know it yet.

So I was walking around with this sense of dread. That a powerful reckoning was on its way, and it was going to seriously shake things up.  So I wrote this song. Of course, the song isn't just about the effects of climate change, but in the third verse, it takes aim at the people who unleash that havoc knowingly.  In the second verse even the rich and powerful get swallowed up by the hurricane. They think they can control these powerful global forces, but the hurricane is bigger than them. By the third verse, I level the worst insult I possibly can (and here's where the English language fails, but rock and roll is able to deliver).

It's funny, because there's a Trump reference "Trump cards, body guards", because he seemed a perfect example of isolated shameless greed. It actually wasn't about him, but about the kind of person who carries around one of Trump's cards. A lot of people in New York thought he was a sleezebag.

At any rate, I first recorded this with the Money Shots. Bob Brockman came to help record this in Louisville along with a bunch of other songs. For a while it looked like I was going to have a lot of money behind my music. I had a Grammy winning producer in the studio with me. But the whole enterprise fell apart.

I ended up in New York (again), and ultimately playing with The Navigators. I took a song fragment that had never made its way into a song, and it became an intro for Phelim to sing. The idea was to create a quiet moment to make the rest of the song more jarring. While the two pieces weren't created as a whole they fit together perfectly.

We recorded it once for Meet the Navigators, and then we recorded it again with James Walsh at Treshold Studios. Later I recorded it again with Bob Brockman and another lineup of Navigators. Obviously, I felt the song was important, but apparently other people did too. We kept trying to put it out there, but not reaching the audience we needed to reach for the song to have an impact. I think a lot of people who have been following the climatastrophe feel the same way I do.

I grew up listening to music from the 60s, and I believed that music could be fun, sweet and also a call to change.  The music industry never really cared about revolution, but if the kids were buying records, they did. That changed when selling music began to follow the corporate playbook. If you tried to change the system, they reasoned, aren't trying to change our business model?  I suppose I could write a whole book on this, but I'll leave it there.

Christ, I've Done it Again

Check this out. 

I wrote this song at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. I remember feeling like I'd gone up a level after I had written it, which is ironic, because the song is essentially about falling short. The refrain, "Christ, I've done it again," is a reaction to my trying to explain myself just when I catch myself, "I mean..."

The song is a collage of truths. For example, over the summer, I was up in that attic in my parents house, when I fell through the floor. My friend Dan Patterson saw my foot pop down in my bedroom. That seemed to be a metaphor for how I felt in new social settings. If I could sit and think about it, I could express myself quite well, but I felt like my foot was in my mouth more often than not in social settings.

The song takes aim at people who live in a world of concrete understandings. That must be nice. When I wrote, "Don't feed me that shit that they do it all the time." I had to drop the "that" for rhythmic reasons, and hope that someone might still get the meaning, because the following line I'm the one saying, "They do it all the time."  I have a lot of songs that criticize people, but only because I'm one of them. 

I first recorded this for Meet the Navigators. Dan Reed said he would play it on WFPK, but it had a bad word. We did an unconvincing radio edit. I don't think he played it, though. 

I was bit reluctant to re-record it, but Phelim and Andrew felt like they could do a better job, and I agree. It was part of the Meet the Navigators sessions. We then re-recorded it for the Cowboy sessions. I think we spent an hour on it. Our manager, Sean was insistent that we record it. Listening back, we did a good job.  I mean, we'd playing it for nearly two years, but it didn't make the cut for Glory, Glory, because it wasn't shiny and new enough for us (I think).  I usually had to be dragged to re-record songs back then. Now, I find that attitude ironic. But when you have hundreds of songs, there's always that feeling that I need to get them out there. 

Just Getting Started

You might want to check out the song here first.

The year was 1998. I had moved back to Louisville from New York City (for the second time).  I had wrapped up recording my first album Who Are The Navigators, and I was all set to promote the album.  I had had some positive reviews, and I had played on several local television stations, and WFPK started spinning the album.  For me, the next logical step was to take the show on the road. I wanted to start playing nearby cities like Cincy, Lexington and Indy.  I figured if I could make all that happen in Louisville, I could do the same in other cities.

I had a label of sorts- Snug Records. The label had managed to put up the money to record the album, and it might be interested in putting some money into promoting the damn thing. I also had a band, but the band had day-jobs that they were really invested in, so the goal was to stay close to Louisville, so they might have a few sleepless nights, but that they would be able to pull it off.  I had played a gig with a pickup band in New York City and had a release party of sorts.  The whole thing went pretty well.

Then the plug was pulled.  The only possible way to make this whole thing was an investment, and Snug Records effectively stopped putting money into it.  I was confused by the whole thing. At the very moment we were building momentum, we stopped.  I felt frustrated and angry, and I wrote "Just Getting Started." It was kind of a grungy Crazy Horse type song, and I began writing more like it. Pretty soon I had a whole set of angry rock songs, which didn't exactly gel well with my rootsier singer-songwriter stuff, so I started a new band- The Money Shots.

The Money Shots recorded it, but the Money Shots only played one show. We were mostly a studio band. Oddly enough, the same group (Colin Brown and Dave Humphries) were the ones who layed the foundation for Lost and Found. 

At any rate, fast forward several years later, and I'm back in New York, and I'm playing with Phelim White and Andrew Emer in the Navigators.  We managed to mix the singer-songwritery stuff with the more aggressive songs pretty well.  Something about a trio made us able to pull that off.  We had fewer tricks to rely on, and so we could move through several different sounds in a set, but they would all sound like us.

We recorded this twice.  The first version was recorded in Graham Hawthorne's studio with Charlie Martinez.  It sounds a lot like we sounded live.  There was an instrumental bridge that we ended up ditching, but I think that was mainly a chance for me to catch my breath live. Even with Phelim's help that song always wore me out. We later recorded it at Threshold Studios with James Walsh.  That version went to 11.  It probably should have made its way onto our album Glory, Glory, but Velour and Threshold couldn't agree on much of anything. James felt that the label should put up money for the recording, and Velour felt like they needed every penny, if they were going to promote the album. Shoulda woulda coulda.

Sooner or Later

Listen to the song here.

Phelim always used the phrase "three chords and the truth" to describe a lot of my songs.  That was a bit of an exaggeration. Most of my songs have more than three chords.  Not this one. This one has the same three chords in the same order over and over. As for the truth... I'll let you decide.  For such a simple song, it sure took a while to write.  Nearly fifteen years to be exact.  

I started writing this song when I was fifteen. By that point in my life, I was deeply enmeshed in Bob Dylan.  I wanted to write like Dylan, but I was fifteen, and had little hope of acchieveing that. But Dylan did have some deceptively simple songs.  His song, "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35" (which you probably would recognize as "Everybody must get stoned") seemed like the kind of song that I could write even as a fifteen-year old. I tried. I came up with a pretty good chorus: sooner or later everyone's gonna hurt you in the end.  I mean, a fifteen-year old can write that, and anyone can relate to it.  But my verses were weak. What I didn't know yet was that Dylan's laundrey list songs are deceptively complicated. They sound like they are nothing more than a rhyme followed by a rhyme leading up to a chorus, but they actually have a direction to them. Listen closely and hear for yourself.

I always thought "Sooner or Later" would become a finished song, but it took another 14 years before I finished it. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend of several years. I had been dumped. We were living together in New York City, which meant that I was homeless.  I mean, I had friends, so it wasn't like I had to live on the streets.  I was spared that pain at least.  For a good three months, I couch surfed.  It was all a blur, but somewhere during that time I wrote the verses to "Sooner or Later." 

They are the words of a devestated man. I had been dumped a day before my birthday, and she gave me luggage as a present.  I jokingly refered to the day as 5/11.  The hurt went deep. And yet... I was very fortunate. I had friends who came to my rescue. Liz, Amy, Wes, Ethan, Drew and Geri ensured that I had a place to stay.  And I was in a band, too. 

Meet the Navigators was recorded around this time. Look at the picture up there, and you can see where I was coming from. It took a few months before the song made it into the repertoire, but it quickly became a staple.  This recording began with David Wallace as our producer.  He played the ripping lead guitar on the song as well.  In a perfect world, he would have become our fourth member, but the stars did not align that way.  I had inadvertantly stolen Phelim from his band, but he was the kind of guy who would help you record some songs despite all that. 

The late Ethan White played keys on the song. In addition to being a great musician, he was a great guy. I let me stay at his place in Dumbo for a while. I got to help him demolish a wall in his apartment. 

One of my fondest memories of "Sooner or Later" is when we first played Bowery Ballroom.  We had a the entire room singing along.  How weird is that? The song is about how shitty people are, and yet it somehow ended up being a sing-along anthem.  I guess it just goes to show that even in our darkest hour, we can find some light. The last verse sums things up nicely, and I'm surprised I wrote it. 

Take a good look at the person sitting next to you

And ask them what they expect of you

They're a time bomb waiting to explode

But so are you from their point of view

So yeah, fifteen years to write a song. You need a fifteen-year old to come up with a chorus so simple that a room full of strangers can sing it when they first listen to it, but you need someone with some real life experience to put that chorus in context. 

Meet the Navigators... Again

Once upon a time in New York, about 15 years ago, there was a band called The Navigators.  That was me, Andrew Emer, and Phelim White (in that order above).  Sure there was a band called The Navigators that I played with in Louisville, but this was the band that really made some noise.  If you witnessed some of the magic at the Knitting Room (where you likely died of thirst while you sweated through your clothes), or the Mercury Lounge (where the show was always over just when it felt like it was getting started), or the Bowery Ballroom (hundreds of people singing along to "Sooner or Later"), or that one special night at Irving Plaza, then you are one of the lucky few.  Actually, there was not that few of you. 

For those of my friends who don't know, the Navigators were a band that was signed to Velour Records, and toured around the country.  The very first album we recorded was cheakily called, Meet the Navigators. We recorded at Graham Hawthorne's studio with Charlie Martinez.  It was a great intro to our sound.  We ultimately sold all the CD's, and in the age of streaming, it seemed a shame that there was no record of this moment.  So I decided to re-master the songs.  As I was listening to the album (and getting nostalgic), I began to listen to other tracks that were lost through the cracks.  

We recorded (and re-recorded) some songs at Threshold Studios with James Walsh.  They were kind of like our second album, but they were never officially released owing to some bad mojo between management and producer.  Finally, I found some songs that didn't make the cut of Glory, Glory. We recorded these at Cowboy Technical.  What could have been a crowning achievement was the beginning of the end. Some bands are designed to go on and on, but The Navigators was not one of those bands.  Does that diminish what we created together?  I wouldn't say so. 

It's hard to believe that only a short while after recording Glory, Glory, there was a new version of The Navigators.  You'll hear more from them later.  In the mean-time, do yourself a favor, and download a copy of Meet the Navigators... Again. You'll be glad you did. 

Hold On

For a short while, I was a Hoosier.  I had just recorded Lost and Found, I had fallen in love and moved in to an apartment in Clarksville, IN. On a day that I had all to myself, I wrote this song.  I had no intentions. When I wrote it, I had the idea that there should be another verse.  It seemed a bit short.  I moved up to New York City shortly after, and I kept playing the song.  A third verse never came.  At some point, I played this song for Phelim and Andrew, and they loved it.  They managed to convince me that a third verse wasn't necessary.  

Despite being a really short song, "Hold On" became a staple of the Navigators.  We had plenty of epics, so having a palate cleanser came in handy.  Phelim, Andrew and I recorded this in Graham Hawthorne's studio with Charlie Martinez engineering. I remember that I had just broken up with my girlfriend, and I was couch-surfing in New York while we recorded this.  If you look at the picture above, you can see that I'm not happy about anything. Still, I was happy with how this turned out.