So Dan Fogelberg, Neil Diamond and James Taylor fall into a giant blender...and the next thing you know you have this acoustic smoothie of love music with solo voice and guitar.

10 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Gentle, COUNTRY: Country Folk



Details:
Once upon a time, back in the days when vinyl record albums ruled the world, Melissa Manchester released an album entitled, âHome to Myself.â It was a mix of love and heart songs.

As a young performer and songwriter, I thought, âOne day, Iâm going to put together an album like that.â All I lacked was enough experience with matters of the heart to serve as the foundation for the songs. About, say, 20 yearsâ worth of experience!!

So, time passed, and I released other recordings over the years, but never my love album.

Meanwhile, I lived in Florida for a long time, where I enjoyed working with fellow cdbaby.com artist Joe McCoy. We had a great time and a grand musical adventure for a couple of decades, sometimes as a folk duo, sometimes expanding into wide-ranging, genre-rambling acoustic bands and at other times forming the core of what we called âcross-roots musicâ country/rock/blues/ballad/dance bands.

Then, I moved to Kansas City, and began working as a solo acoustic artist again. It was fun to revisit the role of the Brave Folk Balladeer. Besides, I no longer had strong enough knees to jump off the drum risers.

I played a few gigs in a little French café as my entrée into the incredible KC music scene. It was a romantic setting and I began to drift back to those plans to record that intimate little love collection.

A lot of my recent recorded work has multi-tracked vocals and multiple instrumentation, because like any writer worth his salt, sometimes I just wanna channel that âPaul McCartney - Maybe Iâm Amazedâ one-man band thang. But, I wanted this collection of love songs to be intimate and immediate, so I sat in the studio with just a vocal mic and a guitar mic, and sang the songs âlive.â

I see this set as the kind of âfurniture musicâ that Satie would compose if he were reincarnated as an old 60's love-generation folkie. It is meant to be sung by the troubadour in the distance, while you are sitting at some shadowy little corner table making googly-eyes at your lover, or you are alone at another table, watching a candle flicker and remembering what it meant to learn about love.

âLove is When Your Souls Kissâ is a story told by a woman who was watching that candle glow, remembering.

âAll I Needâ was written from that profound understanding of how deep love can run. I have often received requests to record it, so come and get it, yâall!

âSheâs Another Timeâ is the story of a friendâs infatuation with an âother womanâ that he met during a tough stretch in his life. He was not the type to have such infatuations, and I wrote this with the desire to capture his story with all of its facets and fascinations.

When a former crush of mine years later told me the story of a disappointing love affair, the result was the song âIf Things Had Been Different."

âMaybe Just Onceâ showed up when I was getting over a broken relationship and starting to feel some interest in pursuing a new one. As my friend Pete used to say, I was in my âNext!â phase. I was able to write this album because I went through that phase A LOT!!

âLast Night I Felt Like Adamâ is a rather odd title for a love song, but I finally found my lasting, true, wonderful love, and this is the story of that moment of discovery. May you have such a moment, if you have not already.

âWhy Do I Need You Now?â See: âMaybe Just Once.â Same phase, different person. Ainât life grand? Sometimes itâs fun to have all of the feelings that go along with those âflavor of the monthâ passages!

âLove Donât Understand the Rulesâ has some of my favorite chord progressions in it, as it tells that story of the inconvenience of falling in love with someone who was unavailable. In the dance-band days, I used to love watching people slow-dance to this one. If I couldnât get lucky at love, at least I could help choreograph it for those that could!

âArthur and Elvaâ is about a lovely couple I met when they had been married for 66 years. They had physical challenges from living so long, but their hearts were pure and always wrapped around each other. They were a beautiful couple, and eventually they died within months of each other. I see them now dancing a graceful, eternal waltz, the same one their hearts have danced all along. Thank you, Arthur and Elva, for showing me what true love looked like, so I would know it when I found it.

âToo Long a Timeâ is my oh-baby-baby song. If the songs leading up to it do their job, this is where youâll wind up! So donât stay in that café forever.