New songs in the solo repetoire:
Up, Up and Away (5th Dimension) — thanks for my friend, Texas songwriter Van Buchanan for his recent post that reminded me!
We’ll Be Together Again (Sammy Davis, Jackie Paris, many others)
A Satisfied Mind (Marty Stuart)
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (The Beatles)
I’ve a new project on the near horizon, in addition to the jazzy quartet work and my forthcoming album of originals. The new project is an album of classic Nashville covers from the 1960s, solo voice and steel-string guitar.
Initial demos sounded good to those who listened and, most importantly, I did, too. Something has changed in my delivery of vocal material.
The twist is that none of the songs on this album will have been very well-known, even when they were issued. But they are gems, every one of them. As you probably already know, I love to mine the American back catalog and have come up flush every time.
In my performing life, I’ve sung Japanese enka on Japanese TV and Taiwanese pop songs in Mandarin on Chinese state television, but I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I would be asked to sing 1950s Bollywood songs in Hindi in Houston, Texas.
I just did, to wonderful reception. And I have a witness!!
In the studio today, mixing quartet tracks with Tony LaVorgna and Andy Bradley (engineer Wire Road Studios in Houston) and recording a few new originals with my Bedell Guitars Revolution prototype. I’m recording voice into a Neumann U87. The guitar is going into a stereo pair of Schoeps Mikrofone CMC641. Great sound! Can’t wait to share it with the world and all of our friends.
Missing also in the young person’s musical diet is a love of (or even mere exposure to) classical works. No allusion to the classics can be found in any — and I mean none at all — pop or jazz or showtune since 1968. This is something that must be remedied.
Sure you might find an exception to prove this generality technically wrong, like Disco Beethoven in 1976. But the point is this: the older writers of sophisticated popular music listened and learned extensively from great tradition.
Here is an example of wholesale copying! The music is ascribed to Paul Weston, but it’s clear where it comes from. When it was issued, I think most laymen who considered themselves musically literate would have known it is Chopin. And of course, the musicians, the composers, well, surely they did.