You can think of Pieces for Love, as, Songs about love in all its facets that are as much about spirituality as about physical attraction. I hope it has as good a mix as a Harry Nilsson album for content, and a clean sound

12 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Folk-Rock, ROCK: Progressive Rock

Show all album songs: Pieces For Love Songs


Details:
I began my music on a 1939 Supro Electric Hawaiian Lap Steel guitar, with a really small tube amp, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, in the late 50's. It was my father's guitar. He had bought if off of a down and out studio musician, by the name of Harris, who had been working at a country music radio station in Cincinati back in the 1940s.

Nobody showed me how to play it. My father never learned how to play it, and no one around me played guitar. I got tired of playing it in my lap. I liked to look around and not have to sit there staring down at the guitar while I scruffed out a sound. I started to play it like people play a sitar. The short guitar body was in my lap with the neck pointing up nearly straight up. I still play lap steel guitars like that. It just feels right.

When I was 16 I got a cheap Silvertone archtop, spruce and maple acoustic guitar. When playing slide, I set the action up very high. I am left handed, but I could not get used to reversing the strings and the chords that are written for right handed people. I made a decision to play right handed. For about two months, I would go up the neck for a run or a chord change, when I was suppose to go in the opposite direction. Later that same year, I bought a set of already very old Kent drums. I still set drums up. left handed.

I loved to listen to Jimi Hendrix Experience on my old record player, and whammed out beats in the mid 60s, like I was the second drummer behind Mitch Mitchell. I really liked playing Eddie Floyd's single, 'Bring it on Home To Me', and would play it over an over again, while I sat in as if I was his session drummer. These drums were really loud. People could hear me nearly a quarter of a mile away, I have been told. I would play some jams with people in Country bluegrass bands, or popular cover bands to play in local events. I never played professionally as a teenager in the 60s. Most of the time they made me play with brushes the Kent drum kit was so loud with sticks.

My parents were always supportive of me. When I began traveling when I was 19, they bought me a very nice Hofner archtop acoustic. I believe it was a 1963 model. It's on the cover of the Album. I played this guitar nearly exclusively for over 30 years with no electric pickup. I loved playing slide guitar. One of my favorite ways to spend time alone, was to walk around in the dark in my house, with music, (nearly any kind of music) classical, country, rock, easy listening, what have you, on a record player or the radio, and play my archtop in standard tuning, and play slide guitar. I found that I played better slide guitar when I warmed up with playing chords, at random, and would go up and down the fretboard, not playing any particular song.

I finally slowed my traveling in 1999, and have stopped long enough to put together an album. I think made some interesting instrument choices. It is of interest that people through the years have been supportive of my efforts. I have met and talked with musicians and people in the music industry along my way. Some famous, some not so famous. Some had quit the music industry. Some had taken off, and went back. Some had just retired after a full career of music. I am constantly amazed, & grateful at the genuinely nice people I meet and have met in the music world.

I have been asked, what does your music sound like. I really don't have a good idea of that. I think I did attempt to make the strings of my instruments clear in their arrangements. I have noticed U2 does the same thing. The main theme for Pieces for Love, is hope for love. I had some things I wanted to say. Love is as eternal as the universe. It has the wealth of a galaxy made of gold. It is as full as this stuff of life & when all is said and done, love still shines on its own. It's still there. Chance and circumstance, luck, yearning to know love and hard work, all play a part for love, and my songs are just twelve pieces for love. I am glad I have had the chance to get them to you. They are meant to be played with volume.

One of my favorite albums, is Harry Nilssons', 'That's the Way It Is'
I think it defies being put into a genre. I think mine does also. I suspect Harry's unique approach to album making has had an impact on my choices of musical arrangements, which this album is witness to....

As an artist, I am reluctant to let people look inside of who I am where my inspiration and mystique comes from.
It is just my nature. I will let go of some things.

When I was just a very young child, my earliest recollections in the early and mid 1950s was of my parent's old AM radio, turned to a Wheeling West Virgina country music station. I can hear the music in my long term memory, of the announcer saying, coming to you live from Wheeling West Virginia, the Saturday Night Jamboree.
The radio waves from such a great distance, all the way to the coast of Carolina, made the sound very ethereal with it dimming and growing louder with a fuzzy old-timey wavy noise in the background and in the music itself. That's the way I spent my Saturday nights, waiting to go sleep, even before I could talk.

One sort of unexplainable thing that happened was, before I could talk english or any language at all, my parents would drive from town, back out into the country where we lived, and there was an ice cream store that stayed open late. There were no seatbelt laws back then, and I used to stand up, beside my mother with my arm around her, and when we would drive by the ice cream store, I would stretch my little left arm out and say, Penda Penda, which was my name for ice cream, which I dearly loved. It is also the name of my Record Label. Penda is also the Swahili word for Love. It is also a favorite Hindu treat of milk sugar and butter that is centuries old.

Also, one of my earliest introductions into contemporary music, was through a friend I met in a church that I started going to when I was about 12 or so. My friend was a through and through Bob Dylan fan. He lived in this back road, with his parents. He was three years older than me. He would invite me to come see him. His bedroom was terribly small, only 5 feet wide, by about 12 feet long. In it were three things, a bed, a record player, and an acoustic guitar. He knew by heart, every Bob Dylan song, that Dylan would come out with, album by album. He'd say, listen to this. I'd listen, and be intriqued, but I honestly couldn't concentrate on the lyrics. He would take out his guitar and show me the chords to the songs we were listening to on the record. We both were searching for a place in the sun at an early age. I had a lot of baggage at an early age. I still found it interesting that my friend found Dylan so full of new meanings to what the possibilites of thinking and music were then. He then did something that I wasn't aware of until years later.

The church we both went to, was a holy roller church. It was hell fire and brimstone, coming at you, and repent and bow to the will of condemnation or salvation, (their way)
was the message every service. My friend used to sit by me and fold a sheet of paper up so there were four folds. He would write something on it, and pass it to me, and I would write a response, on the next fold, and hand it back to him. We would write pages like this, back and forth while the pastors did their thing. It was only years later that I found out that he was writing down Bob Dylan lyrics, but not telling me they were his lyrics, and I was thinking he was just writing very curiously new ideas and bits of stories and poems, to which I would write responses to him, and indirectly and unknowingly to Bob. I don't know the reason my friend did that, or the reason he didn't tell me what he was doing.

I know I am a late bloomer in getting my music out. I told someone, it seems like the wind gets knocked out of my creative sails. I have had heartache, and spent nearly a decade in the woods all over America, as a forest fire fighter and forestry technician. I feel at home in the wild of the woods. I am a deeply spiritual being, that happens to be a human being. I heard George Harrison say that when he went back through his past lives, that he at one time was a pirate. I honestly do not know of any past lives that I have been through. I just feel a kinship with some fellow beings, and I will leave it at that. I would rather keep some things to myself.

I know Bob Dylan made reference in his movie, No Direction Home, that when he went to New York, it was there that he made a deal with a 'power' bigger than him, and his energy became more focused, and things began to happen. I have also heard that a story of Robert Johnson, supposedly made a deal with the devil, down at the Crossroad, because no one could have gone from an OK guitarist to such a dynamic guitarist in such a short time. I have also been told that a rumor has persisted for a while that I have ties to the dark side. I was intriqued when I heard that. I don't agree with that, & have never entertained the idea. I am reminded of a story by Aldous Huxley, called The Magical and the Spiritual. In it, he says that: Certain accidents of heredity permit of easy access to the psychic world;... He goes on to say that Mystics, also, on their way towards Reality and Eternity, frequently find themselves in the region of psychic happenings. To these the masters of the spiritual life always give the same advice: pay no attention to these phenomena, however pleasant, interesting or extraordinary, but press forward in the direction of that which lies beyond phenomena.

I am not troubled by unexplainable phenomena, or by what people think of phenomena. I am pressing forward. I am not really concerned with being called a mystic or not being called a mystic, although some circumstances in my past would indicate that I was in the vicinity when phenomena occurred. I believe my spirit is not a whim or just a collection of psychic & nonpsychic events. I am pressing on, and this album is one way to explore that passage. I have other things hidden inside but I would prefer to keep them where they are for now. Love is a staple of eternity, beyond psychic happenings. There is true happiness and a sadness in this world of laughter and tears. I am pressing on through it all. I hope the Pieces for Love album can help at some point in some way as time goes on.