Every FRIDAY we’ll showcase a NEW RELEASE or a FLASH BACK from one of the Artists we work with! They’ll appear on my FACEBOOK page but we’ll leave them all on this page for you to check out. Also check out the rest of our site for Artists Music and EVERYTHING else that we do!
In association with Kenny Schick’s BOURBON FRIDAY! Have a Pour and Listen More!!
New Releases Friday is a bit of a gut punch today: Many of us are still trying to wrap our heads around the passing of EG Phillips last week, and to further add to the ‘haunting’ feeling of this sad event is what I saw on my Spotify page this morning… The first single from his brand new album released today. I had been prepared to post a ‘Flashback Friday’ of some older songs (in memoriam), as I did not know if EG had been able to upload and schedule the releases of his new collection of songs before he passed, but he gave me an answer from beyond this morning with the appearance of ‘The Speed of Causality’—it is a bitter sweet thing, and I felt a bit queasy when I saw it. This song is quite different than the rest of the collection, as it does not have the same Americana grit as the other songs have…the most stripped down of the collection, it has a melancholy sweetness, and the words are…almost too much right now…. Particularly right after the guitar solo where he makes reference to Baker Beach (“Saw her at the beach near the Golden Gate…”) Two nights this week I woke up from dreams about EG — one of them being at a big memorial service for him in some big old Victorian House —in tears….it just seems so wrong to lose a song writer whose stride kept getting stronger—I had envisioned many more years of his clever observations in song to come. Eric George Phillips loved and lived for his song writing, and I’m sure he’d want everyone to enjoy this last collection of songs he left behind for us…despite how raw his leaving us still is, and despite how hard the lyrical content of this first single hits, enjoy this song and have a toast to EG. I’ll be tipping my glass of bourbon to him later today…. I don’t know his release schedule, but now that I know that things are coming(at least I think…), I’ll make sure to keep you posted as singles and the whole album come live. There are 7 songs in this collection, and it is a really cool collection of his art/writing that I know he was proud of, and I’m certainly very proud of this work too. Cheers EG…..
We recently started doing ‘New Music Friday’ in conjunction with Bourbon Friday so that we can share all the great work from artists we work with—but…we’ve been doing this production thing for nearly 2 decades now, so we also wanted to share some really amazing music from artists and albums from the past—there are hundreds of great artists we’ve worked with, so we wanted to add another new thing called ‘Flashback Friday’. A great artist to start with is the prolific and constantly gigging/hard working Anthony Arya. I met Anthony back in 2017 I believe at a song writing competition I was judging, and at 15 or 16 years old, he stood out as quite a talent. At that time, he was also a contestant on ‘The Voice’, but we met (and began work on his first album) before it aired, so we were not allowed to talk about it for a bit…lol…. However, we started working on his first album together, and we ended up doing 3 full length albums of his great original music, as well as some cover albums and holiday albums. It was such a pleasure working with him and watching him grow so quickly as an artist and musician. Today, our first Flashback Friday feature is L.A. Boy from his album Circles & the Flames, our third LP together.
With over 100,000 plays on Spotify, this one represents his more rockin’ side, but he has always been an artist who does some fun stuff with the music/arrangements and understands the power of building up a song rather than just coming out the gate full throttle. I produced along with Anthony and Kamala. I did all the mixing and mastering. I added the drums and bass on this one (as I did on all the albums I did with him), and he, Sabine and I did back up vocals—Sabine actually does the majority of the back ups on this one (I popped open the session to see what was going on). On this album, Anthony had started to record his own parts, partially due to the ‘Covid times’, but also, he’s always been interested in all aspects of the music making process. The first 2 albums we worked together in the same room for the bulk of the recording, but this album he recorded and sent me his parts (played to the rhythm section parts I sent along). I really enjoy all the attention he gave to the guitar parts and cool melodies. And of course, his great vocals are always the feature! While you give this a listen, spend some time listening to all of his catalog…..there’s so much good stuff to enjoy!
Julie Simpson has been quite prolific over the last few years, and the diversity and quality of her work have made it a joy to be part of her artistry. Piano is her main instrument, so the songs always have a piano base, and the songs run the gamut stylistically—from serious, to whimsical/humorous, deep, reflective….all the emotional places, and the genres also span quite a range. ‘Child of Mine’ sits in the more serious lane lyrically, and stylistically, it’s got a soul/R and B kind vibe, but with some adventurous elements, primarily provided by husband and collaborator Joe Simpson (a killer guitar player and great friend who I’ve always admired since I first met/heard him in the mid 80’s). Like ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd, this song has the dual awesome guitar solos — first one pretty, then an intense explosive beast the next round…. the second one is kind of unexpected in this genre, but it’s perfect and exciting. On drums is my long time friend and fabulous drummer Mike Freitas, but as a musician who knows how to compliment a song, he actually opted to program the drums to stylistically fit what he thought felt right from the demo…. he did play the ride cymbal though…haha…oh yes…and he did play the crotales too… Scot Larsen does the groovy bass part that pushes everything along. All this fun stuff supports the main act, Julie’s vocal, which she delivered with a great smoothness and depth. With many vocal parts, I do a little edit here and there to clean things up…. I think I literally touched 2 notes on this one, and I didn’t have to at all. It was perfectly performed. I came up with the horn arrangements based on the cool parts Julie had put in with midi horns—those were the parts just at the end. I then came up with stuff earlier in the song so the horns didn’t just appear from nowhere. Mixing was pretty straightforward, except the intro…. Julie mentioned she wanted the song to start in ‘gritty old black and white’, then shift quickly into ‘color’….. she referred to the ‘Titanic’ move that has scenes in gritty B and W before shifting to a clean look…. So we went from a warbly, crusty sound and then slammed into ‘color’ as the vocals begin. Give it a listen, and then stay on her channel and keep listening to all her great work.
Last Friday, Modern Dynamics released their full EP, ‘Eclectic Musings’. We featured a couple of the singles from it that were released in advance of the full EP, but now we have the whole thing to enjoy. Today on New Music Friday/Bourbon Friday (‘Have a Pour and Listen More!’), we are featuring a song called ‘No Games’, which I really like for it’s more punk aesthetic. BethAnne has a unique, theatrical, big, dramatic rock voice, and is a super prolific song writer— with a huge back catalogue, and always writing new things, they are already in the studio here working on a new 7 song EP as this one releases! This is the only song so far that BethAnne has strapped on an electric guitar…. just seemed the way to go on this one, with it’s ‘in your face’ nature, though her signature acoustic strum is still in there as well…. I also love Rockin’ Randy’s lead guitar work in this one—has that high octane sound that got me all excited about music back in the 70’s/early 80’s with bands like Cheap Trick, AC/DC, and the Pretenders. It was fun to do the drums and bass for this, as it’s quite the ‘smasher’. We all got to enjoy the release of shouting ‘no games’ (multiple times for the giant group sound)— even got Sabine in on the fun…. As the world seems to be more about the stupid games people play than ever, this is fully relevant and speaks to my state of mind. I particularly like her snarky giggle in the 1st pre-chorus…. Pour yourself a nice beverage of your choice—it will be tequila for BethAnne instead of Bourbon, I’m sure—and give this song a spin… then keep listening to the whole EP… Happy New Music/Bourbon Friday!
On Today’s installment of New Music Friday, brought to you by your good buddies at Bourbon Friday, we feature a musician I greatly admire, and one I’m lucky to call a close friend—Chris Jercha. Though this song came out in the latter part of 2025, and I did share it at the time, I want to share it on our new Friday feature… remember to have a pour and listen more. Many of the artists I work with are primarily song writers who use their instruments as a means to support the songs they write, but Chris is more like me in that he comes from a total music geek background and is a very talented multi-instrumentalist, so his songs don’t come to me as demos, but rather as full Pro Tools session in progress. This song was full of ‘stuff’…. Keyboards, midi horns, midi strings, vocals, guitar ideas, drum ideas… it could have just been mixed, but Chris has me go over things, and rework or add to parts as I see fit, etc. There are so many parts in this song, I almost forget where Chris and I cross over…. Usually, keyboard parts are just all his….I do go in and edit midi a bit for dynamics. This one, I took his original drum idea and built it into a full part. Horns were midi, and I added real sax, and did edits to midi of what was there…I added flute as you can hear in the ’70’s cop show section.’ I had a good time playing an alto sax solo (usually I do tenor, but this was screaming for alto). Often I add back up vocals, as I love doing harmonies—which I did on this…I think Chris also added some in response to mine. That is Chris on bass, and I’m on at least one guitar part… There are many other layers in there too, as you can hear… we called this one ‘the kitchen sink’ mix, as I think it included even the kitchen sink…lol. Chris happens to be one of my favorite singers….we were in a band or 4 together over the years, and I always tried to figure out how to deliver a song like he can. His lyric writing is definitely one of my favorite parts of his writing….it’s not always easy to assess the meaning right away, but that is exactly the kind of writing that interests me. It’s full of emotion and imagery, and so many clever lines. This song is very timely let’s say—inspired by the craziness of our current times. Oh…I also like that Chris has been writing in more of a linear fashion these days…it is almost like ‘movements’… the songs just move along without a lot of common verse/chorus type forms. I am excited that we have more of his stuff in progress that will be featured on some upcoming Friday soon.
On today’s installment of New Music Bourbon Friday we have a song from Raffy Espiritu’s brand new EP (Promise) called ‘Let Spring Time Bloom’ …. Thought we’d start with this one as it’s still spring, and there are many things in bloom all around. Now despite the cheery title, the song does have some darker sounds, as it talks about moving into a brighter place from a darker place (in my mind, the winter to spring transition). Raffy writes a lot of songs that to me have a latin vibe, and this is one of those, so I made the main instrument that starts the whole song nylon string acoustic, and some bubbling congas join in. The song is mostly in a minor key, but…the end chord (spring) ends major… ok music geeks… this kind of chord/harmonic device has a name… let’s see who is up on their music theory…name this harmonic device! 🙂 Often on these songs of Raffy’s, I’ll do a whole string section, but I kept this one a bit more stripped down with a lone violin…. Sabine provided her angelic backing vocals…. I have a fun nylon string solo in there…. I was going to do an arranged string section there… but… I’ve done that on other songs of Raffy’s, so I did something a bit different this time. Enjoy this soothing piece of music with a beverage of your choice!
Brought to you by your good friends at Bourbon Friday, a subsidiary of B3Pmusic.com, we bring you New Music Friday – Have a Pour, Listen More! Today’s feature came out a few months back from Lightholder, who is Sean Lightholder and all his incarnations of musical friends (and family). ‘Prom Date’ is a duet between Sean and his partner Kristen, and it’s just a very sweet song about finding love and romantic experiences a bit later in life than most people. It’s definitely a theme I can relate to, as I was a late starter on all that stuff, and high school was awkward for me in that regard…haha. So was college, for that matter……:) This song came to me pretty well done, and my job on this one was to compose the string arrangement to fit with the existing parts, then mix and master. All the parts are so great, with Steve Kritzer on mandolin, and Dawn Ellerbeck on bass. I’m not sure if there is anyone else besides Sean on the rest of the instruments. It was really fun to work on these strings with Sean…..my first version was pretty elaborate….I think Sean referred to ‘Eleanor Rigby’…haha….. we finally got it to just a sweet part that the music could just float on top of. Mixing is always a fun part of the process for me, so that was indeed fun, and the goal was just to really feature the vocals, and some of those great instrumental parts….. This song began apparently when Sean got a banjo and wanted to write something playing his new toy. You can hear it right out the top of the tune…. I really enjoy the mandolin playing as well.
New Music Friday, brought to you by your good friends at Bourbon Friday…. ‘Have a pour and listen more’…this little tag line is particularly good for today’s featured artist, Kurt Gundersen, who is known for his very tall pours of wine. This song did come out in the ladder part of last year, but we weren’t doing the NMF thing yet, so I’m gonna go back and feature some stuff from the second half of last year as well as brand new stuff. I’m picking this song today for a few reasons: it has a some interesting stuff to talk about from a production standpoint, and it also talks about the place I grew up—Kurt also lived there when I met him, but he is in Maine now, so we both have fond memories of the Bay Area as ‘home’. What you will notice about this song is that it goes through some different feels and tempos—there are a number of songs on this album that have more extreme changes than this one, shifting styles and even time signatures. On Kurt’s albums, he plays acoustic guitar and sings (obviously), and then I do the rest. Some artists send me demos done to a click, but I don’t do that with him, as he does have purposeful changes in some of his songs, and I need to know how he is feeling it. I was talking to another artist yesterday about how most people just select a tempo and then that’s it for the song. I don’t necessarily do that, as I’m really trying to imagine a production as the best possible ‘performance’ of a song—like what the song should sound like live, but with the control and great sonics that you can achieve in a studio setting. That means if I imagine performing it, and I feel like a chorus should speed up or something, then that’s what the music wants. So with Kurt’s demos, I follow areas like that and map out the entire session before I even start recording parts. This song has those parts that go into a 6/8 kind of thing and then hit these places he wanted long pauses…. In those pauses a created ‘sound scapes’, or ‘dream scapes’ to sort of reflect the trippy-ness of it all…it is Golden Gate after all, and I was imagining those days of the Haight-Ashbury scene. This one gets rockin’ pretty good too in parts…had fun with effects and things in the transitions, trying to keep that reflective, dream like quality. The whole album is really a great listen—it has its REM kinda vibes, but also explores many other musical territories. Cheers!!
Today’s New Music Friday features Modern Dynamics again, as they roll out singles from the new EP. BethAnne has several ‘themes’ she loves, one of those being ‘westerns’—those stories about the rugged days of the Wild West. ‘Carrillo’ is about ‘the Mexican Robin Hood’. I wasn’t sure if this was a fictional character from BethAnne’s imagination or not, but I looked it up and found one Joaquín Murrieta Carrillo who is indeed cited as ‘the Mexican Robin Hood’, or ‘Robin Hood of El Dorado’ (believed to be inspiration for fictional character Zorro). With Modern Dynamics, the focus is always BethAnne’s vocal and acoustic guitar, and Randy’s melodic electric guitar leads. My job is to support that and the story line in the most compelling and appropriate way. In the case of this song, I wanted to make it feel theatrical and have that border town vibe, so out came accordion, and of course latin inspired drumming, with lots of tom and timbale work. I’m always a fan of using toms instead of cymbals, so this was right up my alley already. Give it a listen along with…well…maybe tequila in this case! Lol…. I’ll stick to my bourbon on this bourbon Friday, but…. Enjoy this song with whatever beverage brings you joy.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stella on a number of songs now. Some I’ve done a lot of instrumentation for, and others I added parts to enhance tracks that already existed. On Background Noise, I ended up doing all the instruments: drums, bass, cello, and a pile of guitar parts. Stella had a sound in mind—namely, she wanted it to have a Beabadoobee vibe, who is an artist that mixes really dirty sounds with often pretty melodies (I hear influences like the Breeders, Pixies, and a lot of stuff I grew up on). Since the melody is quite pretty, and since the demo had a very different ‘groove’ to it (the demo was just her singing with her acoustic guitar), Stella and I spent a good deal of time trying to solve the ‘getting it dirty and thrashy sounding enough’ problem. The groove of her acoustic guitar in the original demo had a more syncopated thing going on, and so the initial drum part incorporated that ‘skip’ in the rhythm which made it a bit too ‘cheery’. After some discussions, I finally started to realize that the beat needed to be much more straight—just more a chunky eighth note kind of thing. Of course, the dirty bass and guitar sound were also part of it, as were the more naive indie type of repetitious melodies in the guitar parts. I sent the session over to Steve Glaze at Tone Freq (with my panning and levels about where I thought were best), then Stella added her vocals and Steve mixed and mastered it.
Working on ‘I’m So Sweet’ for Julie was a lot of fun. When I got it from her, it was piano, her vocal, and drums by Mike Freitas. Mike had played on an electronic kit, so I got midi, which was great, as I have an extensive library of drum sounds, so I was able to choose a kit that was really stylistically and period specific to this old time-y genre. My main task was to come up with horn parts. I started with clarinet, and that really gave it the right flavor. I added in tenor sax to get the harmonies started, and put in some temporary note ideas on alto sax that I sent to Vinnie Ciesielski, a local trumpet player. One of the main things we really wanted for this song was tuba to hold down the bass. I composed a midi tuba part, and Vinnie had a friend, Scott Hearn, who played tuba and also added trombone. Julie’s husband Joe Simpson played guitar on this as well. It came out like one big party, and it was just the right medicine for me personally, as it was just fun in a time that often feels heavy. Julie is always writing in so many different styles that I never know what she’s going to send me next. Cover by Sabine.
As with all the Modern Dynamics songs, the feature is always BethAnne’s vocal and story. This recent collection of songs was fun in that there were some songs with a bit more of a ‘punk-y’ vibe… that individualistic stand for something better and more honest. This one is sort of in the middle, as it’s not as aggressive as some of the others that will be released in the near future, but it gave me a bit of that late 70’s/early 80’s post-punk/pop feel, harkening back to bands like Elvis Costello, XTC, The Jam, etc. There was an upbeat quality that made me think of those early XTC albums and Costello, so I used a transistor organ—a sound I don’t use to often, but I just kept hearing it on this one. Randy’s melodic guitar solos also helped inspire that vibe. As we were near done, Beth Anne wondered if maybe the choruses didn’t quite have enough angst, so that prompted me to add some crunchy octave guitar parts on the choruses and a few little lead fills to give it a bit more of that angsty energy. I did more back up vocals on this album I think, as we have found my voice blends well with BethAnne’s, and of course, I’m always a sucker for harmonies… 🙂
Raffy’s new song ‘Dance for the People’ has a reference to a snake charmer, so I wanted to get some of that ‘vibe’ in this song. The song itself has fairly traditional singer songwriter type chord changes, and the music played by snake charmers is played on an instrument called the Pungi, which is a reed instrument that only has 7 holes usually, and then a drone note… so it’s in a single key… not a chromatic instrument. The scale is called a Punnagavarali raga, and it has I guess what we would call a sort of minor sound to it. I tried using some virtual instruments similar to it which would allow me to use notes not on the original instrument to fit the song, but I wasn’t loving it. I thought I’d try a clarinet, and that wasn’t quite it, but it did feel more human and organic, played with some inflections that one might hear in that music. I ended up getting it more ‘grating’ by putting it through a distortion pedal and echo. So that was a fun adventure! I read that public snake charming was made illegal in 1991. Anyway… enjoy the song, which to me is about recognizing and sharing your own unique talents. Cover art and video by Sabine.
