jan. 4, 08

thought i'd take a little break from original songs and put up a cover this time. if you're around my age or a student of pop music you might remember it, music to watch girls by. it was written by sid ramin (music) & tony velona (lyrics) around 1966. i'm not sure which came 1st, but it was a jingle for diet pepsi and an instrumental hit for the bob crewe generation and a vocal hit for andy williams.

 i hated this song as a kid. it had a tijuana brass kind of sound, which i always thought was corny. it came into my head one day and i thought i'd start doing it on gigs as half a joke. i began playing it slower and slower, then singing it and it got under my skin.

i think the melody is pretty unique and the chord structure is very cool. fun to improvise on, too. the lyrics have a lot going on for me, tongue in cheek but with some real heart.

maybe i'm way off, but i really like it.
                                        
                                                                
 
march 14, 08 - a ballad this time, and a sad song, called goodbye elena. when i first met bernadette, she was just coming out of a 20 year marriage, had gotten hitched and had a family very young, in her teens. she was feeling that after looking out for everybody else and putting herself last for so  long, it was her time to find out more of who she was and what it felt like to be in control of her own life. after a while i was really starting to fall for her, but felt the last thing she'd want was to have a 'relationship'. the song was me feeling a real pull towards her, but knowing i'd have to let her go. elaine's her middle name, a little poetic licence.
       
but the song has a happy ending, we've been together 10 years, i guess you never know.
may 30, 08 - a little bit out in left field with this one but that's how it goes, you never can tell what's going to come down the pike.

shot by a lover, the original title was 'paranoid fantasy in e'. a few years back i was involved with a woman who wouldn't take no for an answer, lots of scary messages and threats. i stayed in a different hotel from the other guys in the band, hiding out. she was camped in the lobby, making everybody's life miserable. it lasted way too long, a big mess.

 i was never scared for my life.  it's one thing to threaten and scream, it's another to do time, but i sure was thinking about the subject a fair amount. and i'm certain pretty much everyone's experienced the flip from love to hate from either one side or the other. i assume i'll get a few emails on this, could be interesting.

thought i'd play it on a celeste, best known from the dance of the sugarplum fairy in the nutcracker suite. after all, it's  a lullaby. And making their 1st appearance, the timmytones.



 
sept 8, '08 - ok, i can see a pattern emerging here. the warm weather comes and i don't get around to putting up a new tune for a real long time. i just hope i don't move to florida, i'll never write again.

but i did eventually get to it, and it's called bible by the bed. a song about everybody's favorite subject, adultery.  i think a lot of people would agree there's 2 basic kinds of adultery, with a few sub-types i'm sure. one is just dogging around, pretty indefensible. the other is being in a relationship that's not right, or not right anymore, and falling for someone else against your better judgement.

lots of grey area there of emotion, tension and interpretation, and i thought fun to play around in.

it was also fun to play a fair amount of sax on this one. it reminded me of the old days in the 70's and 80's when there was a pretty thriving recording session scene in new york and you'd go in a blow a solo on somebody's pop song. long time since there's been a sax solo on a song you hear on the radio, just gone out of style. boo hoo, we're obsolete.

                                        
dec 29 '08  - if you came to this website because you thought 'whatever happened to that crazy buffed-out sax player that used to play for tina turner. i wonder why he never made it', here's your answer. the latest song is called homeless heart and i wrote it a little more than 20 years ago. i had a publishing deal at warner bros music,  they pay you a salary to write songs in return for a percentage of money the songs might make.
they're basically betting that someone will record your songs or you'll get a record deal.

the 1st thing they tell you is 'write what's in your heart', which of course means 'copy the person on the radio that most resembles what's in your heart'. i tried for a while, with pretty embarrassing results, then started writing some songs i actually liked a little. they were similar to the songs i've put up here so far, melodic and romantic. for better or worse, it's the kind of music i love.

this would be career suicide for anybody, but especially for hip-shaking bronto-boy. i remember going into the office to play it for them and they pretty much ignored it.  i think somebody said it sounded like a film soundtrack, i still haven't figured that one out.  i knew my days were numbered cause i knew i wanted to write more songs like this.
 
and numbered they were, the next one I'll put up was the one that lost me the deal, thank god.        
april 1, '09 - new song up today, it's called cuatro de mayo. i  wrote it about 1989 or so,  i was living in la. every sunday i'd get in the car and head south mostly, trying to find a nice town to live in. i remember it like it was yesterday, driving down the 405 and i saw  long beach harbor coming up. don't know if it's changed much now, but i was shocked by it's ugliness, kind of like the 1st time you see elizibeth new jersey coming up the turnpike, it can take your breath away with it's wrongness, literally.

i thought 'yeah, humans can do some pretty stupid, short sighted stuff, but lots of us know it can't go on much longer, maybe we're on the verge of something new'. that's when the phrase cuatro de mayo, (or the day before the revolution, although i guess it's more an american holiday than a mexican one), popped into my head. and then it really seemed like it described how i was feeling about myself as well. like i said last time, i was writing pop songs for warner bros. publishing and doing a little acting, mostly auditions for psychotic killer roles. so i guess 'there's got to be something a little deeper' was on my mind a lot.

when i brought it in to warner's they just hated it. one guy thought it was literally about the civil war, another said it sounded like peter gabriel (don't ask, i have no idea). but both said if i was going to write more songs like this, i had no place with them. the friends i played it for knew exactly what it was about, so i assumed i wasn't crazy.

anyway, i let my contract run out and didn't write another song for a long time. but dagnabbit, it's 20 years later and i still like it. so there.

thank you so much, my sister joanie. she came up and sang the backround parts. she sings with a wonderful chorus, the collegiate chorale here in new york. but as far as i know it's the 1st time she's recorded and she sounds just awesome.
august 4, '09 - this one is for all the ex's. ex drinkers, druggies, food, money, sex, i guess it's all the same. as somebody who's had problems with stuff like this over the years, it's something i think about a lot. pleasure, when to give in, when to keep walking. renunciation, when does it really make you stronger and when does it just make you boring and tight.                

one thing i seemed to see in myself and other people who got trapped in addictive stuff is not really experiencing what was going on, the need for sledgehammer pleasures cause we weren't all that much there. so i wrote a song about it called a kiss on the phone. it's about trying to shorten the distance between myself and the world. i'm not sure how many people feel the same, maybe some of you will tell me.

coming from a pretty vacant, distant kind of upbringing, finding music was like opening  a door to another world of feelings, looseness, hipness and pleasure (that's the female figure in the lyric, the part of myself that said 'this is life, too. don't you want it all the time?'). so that led to 25 years of a rock musician's libertine life.

and now that that's over hopefully it's time to relax a little and accept the subtler, deeper pleasures life offers. it's a nice thought, anyway.
nov 11, '09 - i'm not sure why i like it, but i do. it's not especially inventive, original or different. not saying anything very profound, only got 3 or 4 chords to it, kind of repetitive. why do i like it, I can't really say. it does have that very memorable hook of a chorus, maybe that's it. maybe it's some buried childhood memory. 'too late to turn back' just lays itself out in such a nice relaxed way, i always wanted to slow it down and magnify it's sincerity. originally performed by the cornelius brothers and sister rose around 1972. their other hit was treat her like a lady, also a goodie.

again joanie came up and sang the high backrounds with me. she's got this lovely gentle quality to her voice, i'm glad she comes up and helps with these songs. the cappello brothers and sister joan, a little sorbet between courses to clear the palette.