Moonshine, moonlight, heartbreak, goodtimes, front porch, white sand, stars, stripes, no plans, deep roots, blue skies, backyard, feels right music!

15 MP3 Songs in this album (59:39) !
Related styles: Country: Contemporary Country, Country: Country Rock, Mood: Fun

People who are interested in Paper Street should consider this download.


Details:
It was a warm October morning in 2007. I was standing by a Yellow Cab in front of my Southern California Townhouse. The bags were heavy. So was my heart. Sunlight broke through the shadows then disappeared once more behind the passing clouds. The kids were waving down to me from the front window. I wiped the tears. Looking back was hard. Hell, it still is. It was a somber time. It was a sad story. It was an unsung ballad. That day was when the first serious thought of writing country music entered my mind.
My naval career had taken me many places throughout the years. It gets harder to leave when you have a family though. The children were young. My marriage struggled. They all got left behind. I was at the airport swallowing that fact along with every ounce of my over priced beer while I waited for that long flight back east.
The guy sitting next to me at the gate commented on my sour expression. He was an older gentleman, mid forties at least. He wondered what a thirty year old like me was that down in the dumps about. I tried not to think about it until then. When I told him that my life was a country western song waiting to happen, we both smiled.
"We are all on our way somewhere!" he said. Then he asked where I was headed.
From where I ended up now, I suppose in many ways back then, I really didn't know.
At the time, I was at a Navy Supply Corps Officer School in Athens. GA. Upon its eight month completion, my military education would continue onward to Groton, CT and inevitably I would be back overseas but for some wild reason I left most of that out. I answered him with the quirky idea that I might just head to Nashville and get my brand new dream for country stardom started. Well, he happened to know a music producer in Nashville that might be able to help me get there- Mark Dreyer. What were the chances?
I've done some pretty crazy things in this life so a road trip to Tennessee on a whim to talk to a recording producer (even though I had no material written) didn't seem out of the ordinary. Actually, it was just what the doctor ordered.
It's a good few hour drive from Atlanta to Nashville and the highway is a great place to unwind the labored miles of the mind. Mine was speeding towards the uncertainty that awaited me at each turn I would have to make in the years to come. The short trip, although a ballsy journey, was the first of many. All the while, this record skipped in my brain while the melody and jumbled words of that unsung ballad played over and over again until that Nashville sign appeared alongside the road.
There really wasn't much to me and Mark Dreyer meeting at first. I never remembered the name of the gentleman in the terminal who had led me to him. Regardless, I was greeted with warmth and professionalism. Mark was a real genuine character despite the short business pitch and hurried demeanor from his action packed schedule. I looked up his credentials online and was definitely impressed with his biography and experience in the music business. He asked a few of questions and answered all of mine. He recommended a couple song writing books, then he told me to look him up after my travels and to get writing! That was about it. The ice for me was broken though. The seed was planted. The weekend in Nashville rocked, I went on to finish my Navy schooling and it was back to sea once more.
Time on the water can be trying. Months away from home and weeks without seeing land can be rough. When I wasn't working, I was writing to help pass the time. It's funny where your imagination will take you when there is nowhere else to go. I travelled far with mine.
I've always written. Mostly short stories and poetry but I shifted gears, formed melodies to different rhyme schemes and inevitably songs appeared from the words I was arranging. They are real life. So much of me began to emerge with the thought of each one. War was merely a hundred miles away. The jets jolted the steel world around me as they took off and landed atop the floating runway of that aircraft carrier time and time again. I prayed they'd find their targets. I dreamt of home and the kids. I reminisced about the days of my own innocent climb amidst the tangled branches on this sprawling tree of life. The leaves were changing around me once more.
I didn't always really know I had much of a voice. I "JOKINGLY" opened my mouth many years ago when the Hispanic Heritage Committee at my old shore command needed someone to sing the National Anthem at their ceremony. I said I would, not thinking that anyone could possibly take me serious. Well, they did! Five hundred programs ended up with my name on them singing the Star Spangled Banner. For the two days leading up to the event I must've taken twenty showers and sounded like the cleanest, most patriotic tenant that neighborhood has ever had. As nervous as I was, I took the foot out of my mouth, gargled warm lemon water and standing proud with the microphone I just sang it. Surprising to me and many, it went well. So good, in fact, that I even began being requested at numerous retirement ceremonies and special events that followed. On the Arabian Sea, however, that voice was muddled beneath the constant sounds of our mission. It would be heard again someday.
When I finally returned stateside after that arduous deployment, the collection of songs I'd written was fairly large and I began singing them to small audiences upon friendly requests. I formed a little fan club of a sort. I continued to write. It was still just a dream that my lyrics and melodies would ever have music to embellish them. I didn't know where to begin. Another year passed before the light bulb flashed on and I called Mark Dreyer back. The rest is history.
To this day, neither one of us know who the man in the San Diego airport that blindly introduced was. Some say it was the devil at the crossroads. Some say it was an angel there to relight a torch that had been blown out in the storm of my world at the time. Maybe it was a messenger of both.
The CD Mark and I put together is comprised of our distinct tastes and individualities on a common middle ground. It is smack dead center a time when I am tugged between my longing to share the music that I love and the career as a Sailor I have sacrificed so much for all these years. It encompasses the inseparable distance a heart has to its home despite the miles our lives may force us to travel away. Our music marks those miles. It is inspired by the good and bad we all face here on earth. It was completed by two souls with parallel creative dreams who- somehow- someway- met here: on a paper street... somewhere in between.