After much thought, I decided that instead of printing booklet to accompany the CD, I might save a tree or two by posting the same online.
During the intense, 3 1/2 day span I'd spent at Woodside Avenue Music Studios in Evanston to make this album, these are some of the stories I had shared with my audio engineer, Steve Rashid, about each of these tracks:
| Smoke & Steel |
"Smoke & Steel" came out of my walking by Ground Zero on the first anniversary of 9/11. Hundreds of hopeful notes and prayers and angel drawings had been scrawled on plywood fences adjacent to the site, and even after workmen drowned it all out with successive layers of black paint, the notes gradually returned, more sparsely this time, in silver ink. This entire album was composed in my apartment, which overlooks the World Trade Center site. |
| Rotten Tomatoes & Cheap Socks |
This track was conjured from blues lessons learned firsthand from cutting class to go hang out on Maxwell Street in Chicago before the marketplace was torn down. For anyone who picks up a guitar in Chicago, there is nothing but the blues--the longing to escape the grind, of being short on cash, aching from all that love done wrong amid battery-powered amps and burning oil drum garbage cans. I’d come home with a sack of cheap socks & beautifully ripe tomatoes, which seemed to be perfectly timed to go rotten by the time I walked through the front door. |
| Black Feather | I had written this track when I was in a furious rage. Now all that’s left is the music... |
| Bats & Umbrellas | "Bats" was inspired by a surreal moment during a stay at an U.K. estate where Salvador Dali, Magritte, Man Ray and Picasso had once been guests. I was returning to my room when I remembered I had left behind my compact umbrella in the pub. When I tracked back to the main hall, I saw that someone had thoughtfully hung my umbrella near the tapestry behind the desk. When I reached for it, it flew away. |
| Ace's Four Vagabonds | I wrote this track while doing jury duty. The first full day I'd spent staring down the Depression-era murals painted inside the Centre Street courthouse led to my reading Edward Anderson’s novel, Hungry Men on the second day--and then writing this piece on the third. The track is named for the flop-house band dreamed up by book’s protagonist, a down-on-his-luck musician who sleeps on the park benches with his musician brothers in Battery Park in Lower Manhattan. |
| Enniscorthy | This track is named for the small town in Ireland where Queen Elizabeth I bequeathed a castle to the poet Edmund Spenser after he wrote 'The Fairie Queene.' James Joyce gives the town a mention in Ulysses, with an inscription on the flyleaf of a book owned by protagonist Leopold Bloom which reads, "Ennifcorthy, County Wicklow, the finest place in the world." (It is actually located in County Wexford.) |
| Red Tug | "Red Tug" was written in memory of my cousin Nancy, a garrulously warm, raccoon-hunting, diabetic and chain-smoking, retired nurse I discovered via an online genealogical hunt. Nancy had sent me a yard sale ceramic cartoon red tugboat as a gift, steeped in the scent of cigarettes, and unfortunately it broke during a cross-country move to New York. Whenever I see red tugs pass by now along the Hudson, I cannot help but think of her. |
| Leaves | I wrote this when I was faced with letting go of a disappointment--waiting for a friend to step up to his better angels--and then finally, recognizing it was not going to happen. |
| If Today Could Always Be New Year's | An intriguing idea—what if every day was greeted with that same burst of hope and a clean slate that we greet each New Year’s Day? This track was written shortly after midnight once I returned home from a party where I had counted down the New Year with a transatlantic mix of French and American actor friends who make up the cast in several of Luc Besson’s Arthur & The Incredibles films. |
| The Road to Indio | This track is all about the California desert road trips I took to see my Great Aunt Freida, who was a photographer and journalist for the Chicago Tribune back in its hard-boiled, Colonel McCormick days. At the age of 25, she had made her own headlines in 1941 when her plane disappeared en route from Uruguay to Brasil. Six weeks later, she and the plane’s party of four emerged unscathed, having repaired the torn wing of the plane with tree branches. She initiated the Inquiring Camera Girl column in 1941, which a young debutante named Jacqueline Bouvier wrote a version of ten years later for the Washington Times-Herald. |
| Sid's Swagger |
The piece originally comes out of a conversation
I had with Ernie Brooks when Gary Lucas invited me to sit in on a recording
session of their band, Gods & Monsters, in a Lower East Side studio.
With photos of the Ramones and Patti Smith staring down, Ernie asked me,
almost as a challenge, “You play guitar, don’t you?”
I was still playing classical at the time so I replied, “I might
not be able to play like the Sex Pistols but I could definitely play you
a picture on the classical guitar on how Sid Vicious would’ve swaggered.” |
| Roses of Crimson Fire | Inspired by the W.B. Yeats love poem, “He
Bids His Beloved Be at Peace.” |
| Tennessee Turk | A fusion of American country blues with a Middle Eastern twist, this track is in the open high E-tuning taught to me by John Hammond. The Middle-Eastern twist is for my father, who is from Istanbul and now lives in Tennessee. |
| Pewter Sky | A sonic portrait of London in the fading winter sunlight. Jimmy Page and I were taking turns in trying to describe the eerie quality of light which hung low over the city as the afternoon slipped by, with Big Ben tolling in the background. He liked my description and thus, the title stuck. |
