Album Notes

I'm a songwriter who grew up in the San Francisco area. moved to Europe in 1995, and gigged with a small ensemble in and around Prague, 180 shows a year for five years; we recorded this album during the last year, 1999-2000. We knew the songs well, and we knew what we wanted to do; plus the recording time over there was cheap so we were able to take a lot of time. Some of the songs (Firin It Up) are ear-tickling on headphones. Some (Quite All Right, Yes She Is) are more straighforward arrangements.

We stretched out on this recording, adding Saxes and Organ where we thought it might work; in that respect it reminds me of the Beatle's White Album, where the mood and genre of one song may be quite different to the one that follows it, from the stripped-down rockabilly that is our normal sound (Quite All Right, Cadillac, My Black Mama, etc.) to a cushy big-band jazz ballad (Solitude), a full-on Brit-Blues screamer (Its Own Sweet Time), an Elliot Smith-style intimate tragedy song (Clementine, inspired by and named after his own song), a folk-rock anthem waltz (It Was There), a bluesy, loungy LONG heartbreak lament (Failed Love), and a few different kinds of just plain fun.

All in all, we did our best to get this as right as we could, and we are VERY happy with how it came out. We'll probably do it simpler in the future, so this one will stand alone in its stylings.

I wrote all of these songs, except: 'Solitude' by Duke Ellington; 'She's So Cool', by Rusty Miller, who's a friend of some friends of mine, and 'My Black Mama' which is an old Son House song with a couple of lyrics borrowed from Robert Johnson.

More questions? Take a listen, or email me at jeremy@saxon.com