Last week I had the pleasure of getting together with Mark Schwaber, who looks like he’ll be playing some stuff on some songs (Flowers On The Fire Escape, Fight Or Flight, Other States). He  brought a lot of ideas to the table. It was refreshing to hear these songs in a new light. We’re getting together again this evening, along with Greg Saulmon whose guitar stylings will be surely welcome. Greg has played along with me for my last couple of shows.

It’s been great for me to think about working with a  bunch of different musicians. One of the challenges, however (for them, mostly), is that I don’t really have many demos of most of my songs. So I setup the dining room last night and recorded a couple tunes so I can pass them around and see if anyone wants to play on them. Also it was my first foray into Garageband recording so I wanted to see if I could act like I knew what I was doing. I used some pretty shitty mics and mic stands and the cats were running around, so I did a few takes.

The Gatekeeper is a song I wrote last week. Not sure if it’ll be on the album, but here it is. I recorded this live while singing along to what I was playing.

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Fourth Floor is a Northernly song I’m hoping to convince Aric Bieganek and Rebekah Dutkiewicz to record with me. I recorded the piano track first, then put down the vocal track.

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You can read all about the process of starting the new record here.

Over at MassLive.com, I am the Featured Download this week. Head on over to download your copy of You Were A Cynic and Other States. They were recorded back when Mr. State Shirt himself was in town. He even played the melodica on Other States.

Lyrics to You Were A Cynic:

You were a cynic when I knew you long ago, but since then things have changed somewhat. Some years have passed and now you find yourself alone. Your time at home is bittersweet. In time, the failures that you hid inside yourself and hopes you have will coexist. But every hourglass you smashed against the wall has somehow failed to prove your point. Has somehow failed to prove your point.

Lyrics to Other States:

Every single friend of yours has moved to other states. Now every lonely evening feels the same. Who will listen to you? ‘Cause you have burned some bridges and have stepped over loose change. And now you have no-one to call who will listen to you. No one who will listen to you.

When Ethan visited Western Mass. back in October, we spent a couple of days recording two short songs and one not as short song…

You Were A Cynic (1:56)

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Other States (1:12) with Ethan on melodica

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Fight Or Flight (3:14)

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The new State Shirt cd, This Is Old was released just last month. Ethan has been busy promoting that and also scheming up some shows for himself. He and I are trying to get some sort of Matthew Larsen / State Shirt / ??? tour happening in late Spring…