When unconventional crash-and-burn sax meets progressive rock, you have a new genre with Peace of Mind by John McCormack. This will rev your engines, or at least help you forget about the traffic. Who knew a sax should do all that?

8 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Progressive Rock, ROCK: Instrumental Rock



Details:
When unconventional crash-and-burn sax meets progressive rock, you have a new genre. Peace of Mind, John's first solo album, meshes soulful sax, raw piano and gutsy guitar with a powerful progressive rock rhythm section. Who knew a sax should do all that?

For over 28 years, John has played his raucous guitar-style sax throughout the Midwest and New York. John's influences are quite varied for a horn player, including Jimi Hendrix, Rush, Bob Marley, Santana, The Allmans, and of course, Charlie Parker.

While based in St. Louis, John played drums and toured with Lost Idaho and played sax with I Don't Know, Green Eggs and Spam and Just Add Water, which were all mainstays on the St. Louis club circuit. Once back in New York City, John was a founding member of Souled Out, one of New York's top R&B/Soul bands and still rockin' well into its second decade, with other local projects including What It Is, Get On Up and Coolfish.

You can catch John with Souled Out and Coolfish in the New York metro area by visiting www.souledoutny.com and www.coolfishband.com.

You can email John @ jmacksax@hotmail.com.

Please let me know what you think of the album by leaving a review with cdbaby.com.

Album Notes

Peace of Mind features six songs written, performed and recorded by John McCormack from 1984 - 1997, all redone from scratch in 2005. The two songs completely original to this album are Peace of Mind and Out of My Winter.

Go Ahead And Rain represents an exuberance of life without care. Recorded as an instrumental on this album, the song's original lyrical version was copyrighted and was toured with Lost Idaho throughout the Midwest in 1987, featuring John on vocals & drums.

Without A Doubt was written with all of John's love for his wife Stacy. This is a pure rock jam with guitar lead.

Out of My Winter demonstrates what can happen if you forget your troubles and know that it's better to let go of things you can't change.

Booth Street (Forever You) is most ideally heard while driving your Beemer through the Alps, or so I'm told.

I Know What You Know, written in August of 1984, was originally recorded in 1988 by the members of John's high school band, Radical (how 80's!). The sax is raw with emotion and has been described as "vintage John."

Danger Damage Almost Over and It's Good To Be Home For Christmas were written in December 1989 during John's last full semester in college in St. Louis. Despite a sprained ankle, crutches, half a foot of snow and finals and papers due, John found the time to pull some all nighters and do these first two ventures into the realm of synths and doing his own mixdowns.

Peace of Mind, the track, is at the same time a dark and broody work with "peace" found in the joyful Spanish guitar. This was the transition song gapping John's old and new, and inspired the idea to do the album itself, thus deserving the album title.

All compositions were written by John, and John performed all parts using a Roland EXR-5 Arranger/Composer together with his beloved 1957 Conn "Ladybird" tenor sax. John's new Selmer series III tenor debuted on "It's Good To Be Home For Christmas."

The album cover design is John's Happy Cat, which is the only thing John can draw (well not really, despite drawing it since he was a kid). It was the symbol for John's Happy Cat Productions when promoting his bands I Don't Know and others in St. Louis. The inset photos are the two sides of one very happy cat, Benny, sometimes calm and sometimes crazy. Stacy created the album artwork under John's close (too close!) supervision.

Nothing is impossible.