Album Spotlight: Cave Sessions Demo

Click on the album cover to listen at BandCamp.

I've mentioned before how important my friend Josh Cave has been to me starting to write music. He was one of the first major cheerleaders. Because he is also such a great musician and had done some recording himself, having his support was so affirming to someone who wasn't sure about songwriting to begin with.

When we started playing together, I would go over to his house and we'd play around on songs together. Eventually, we did this enough that Josh said, "Let's record some of these." So we did. Because I had never recorded before, it took way longer than it should have. I would screw up the tempo or majorly shank a chord. Josh was very patient with me. Eventually, we knocked out these few songs, which are among the first songs I ever wrote. Last Face and Salem Road are in the first 5 songs written.

These are really demos that I threw together and put on Bandcamp. Zion went on to make it on the first album. I find that even now, these are among my favorite songs I've written. Thanks to Josh for producing and playing and pushing me to keep writing. (He's still doing that today with helpful texts on songs I'm posting here!)

1. The Last Face: This is a daddy/daughter song. It's pretty morbid. I wrote it with the thought that when I die, there's a good chance that my daughter Bronwyn will be the one to be caring for me. It's not that the boys wouldn't, but Bronwyn has her mother's instincts of care. The major hook for me in the song is that in the way I held her as a baby, she may be holding me in my last days. Her face wouldn't be a bad one to see as I make that transition. I workshopped this song at the Glen Workshop with singer/songwriters Karen Berquist and Linford Deitweiler, also known as Over the Rhine, and a group of other talented artists. One person in the class said this reminded them of a Townes Van Zandt song, which I thought was a great compliment. One person in that class, Nellie St. Croix, a wonderful songwriter and violin player, agreed to do the violin part and she completely nailed it. It makes me cry to this day. At the Glen Workshop, Nellie and I and a few others were put in a group to write a song. We named our band the Little Fuckers. Ha! Many thanks to Josh, Nellie, and the folks in that workshop to helped this song come to life.
   

2. Salem Road: Another song about my kids and my wife. Between Pine Mountain and LaGrange, Georgia is a country road that Molly drove to go to the grocery store. There wasn't a grocery store in Harris County, so she had to drive up to the nearest "big" town. So when the kids were little, she'd strap them in and drive them up to LaGrange along Salem Road. She always remarked how she loved that drive. The chord progression was taught to me by Allen Levi, another influential person in my early days of songwriting. Allen is a local celebrity in Harris County and just the most wonderful person you could ever meet. He quit his job as a lawyer to write songs and perform full time while caring for his family farm. I met with him weekly for a while to learn more about songwriting and guitar. I also workshopped this one at the Glen Workshop, and was surprised that everyone loved it and it is pretty much the same as it was the first time I played it. At the end of the Glen, we did a concert and I played this for everyone and got a huge response. Nowadays, it's a song I like to improvise and jam on a bit more. When I play it live, I add a harmonica solo and drag it out for a good 6 or 7 minutes.
   

3. Zion, Talbotton: This might be my best song of the early days. I workshopped it at another songwriting retreat I did in Alabama with Pierce Pettis and when I played it, he kinda gasped and made a comment about how he liked the key changes. This song is about a church I got roped into taking care of. It was one of the oldest Episcopal churches in Georgia, but all the Episcopalians were gone and had been for 60-70 years. Just this building remained. I was the closest priest to the church, so the Bishop asked me to take care of it. My parishioners and I did, and even raised a little money for some renovation. We used it as a recording studio as well, and several local musicians recorded albums there. Today, the church was given to the local historical society, and was granted a major grant to do work on it. It's in better shape now than it ever has been. They even host an annual blues festival there. One day, I was in there by myself and wondered what the church building would think about her long life, and that's where the lyrics came from. At a show once, someone commented to me, "Damn, I've never heard 'genuflect' in a song, much less the first word!" I'll say more about this one when I do a post about Incomplete Dreams. I've got a lot of Zion stories.

So that's The Cave Sessions Demo. Hope you like it. Hop over to Bandcamp and give it a listen.