Album Notes

"Had a little talk with my muse and I made a choice: Trial separation, separate vacations, hoping to find my voice." -from the track "Clean House"

What happens when a Nashville singer/songwriter completes a ten-year plan to succeed commercially, and is informed by the top brass at two of Music City's top music publishers that his songs are "better than 99% of what we hear" but "we'll pass because we'd like to see cowriter names we recognize"...? In this case, the result is the dance-influenced side project Separate Vacations, originally released as an underground word-of-mouth disc in 2005 and reissued with a redesigned package in 2009.

A creative crisis resulted in the guitar being sent to the corner, its role temporarily filled by a keyboard, a drum machine, and much red wine. The spontaneously-created songs that came to life include an I-want-my-hope-back plea in a synth-pop marching band meets "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" mash ("Repo Man")...a soul-hop message to friends explaining why they wouldn't be seeing their jaded peer on stage for a while ("Clean House")...a desert-house rave sharing the desire for escape-via-frivolous-vacation ("Sin City")...and an examination of life lived in an excessively-introspective fashion ("Deep").

Dan Schaefer would allow the guitar out of the corner and return to Nashville's music community, and eventually release the pop record So Romantic in 2007 and the country-flavored Wild Ideas in late 2009...but only after the creativity-versus-commerce conflict was examined and perhaps resolved on 2005's Separate Vacations.