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 Music Friday: Again, the music of EG Phillips keeps haunting us by popping up on streaming services after his sad and unexpected passing in June. EG had obviously scheduled this all to release as singles, leading to the full album, and that is lucky for us. This is supposed to be the final single before the rest of the album pops. It was a really fun project to work on with him, and he was so excited to release and promote this work. I guess I feel it’s my job to let y’all know when the new songs come out.
We think, though there is some stuff we will never quite know, that he was taking video for the first of these singles (The Speed of Causality) when he passed….
This single entitled ‘Moonflower’ is a dark murder ballad —the whole collection is on the darker side, and the inspiration for the sound was to use more acoustic instruments one might find in a bluegrass ensemble.. but this isn’t straight up bluegrass at all, so some other stuff made its way in.
‘Moonflower’ features Mark Robertson on the big tall bass, Amberly Rosen with her super cool and creepy fiddle approach, and myself on nylon string guitar, percussion, and the non-bluegrass electric guitar. It was such a pleasure to use some of the fine musicians here in Nashville for this project. The song sort of builds to a frenzy, so I felt the power of electric guitar would be helpful on this, and since we weren’t totally tied to tradition instrumentation, we kept it in there.
EG often uses historical and mythological imagery in his songs, and I wish he was here to elaborate on this song more… I just take it for the story it tells, but I’m sure there is some juicy tidbits in there that are referring to some literary stuff I don’t know about.
As the weather heads into fall, I find this music very fitting… I am just guessing, but I feel the rest of the album should drop just before Halloween, and as EG was a very methodical planner, I bet this was exactly his intention… this music is a great Fall/Halloween soundtrack….We will have to wait and see if it does drop in a month or so, as we just don’t know for sure.
As we say on a Bourbon Friday: ‘Have a pour, and listen more’!
Today’s new music Friday, in association with bourbon Friday (we will call it Welsh Whiskey Friday this week), is a special one. We are featuring a full album (rather than just a single) from Keith Jones, who wins ‘the longest distance to come record’ award.
Keith is an artist residing in Wales, and I met him through another artist I worked with named Erin Bentley, and I’m guessing that’s all about a decade (or more) ago now. I met Erin when I still lived in the Bay Area, and she had gone to a songwriting workshop in the UK, where she and Keith met and wrote some songs together. We recorded a few of those collaborations, but Keith recorded his parts there in Wales and sent them over for me to add to the songs while Erin and I worked on them in the Bay Area.
Keith and I always kept up on the socials, and he said one day he wanted to produce an album of his own music with me—hopefully even come here to Nashville. Well that day came!
Some time last year, we started getting the songs all prepared for him to come here where he would add his guitar and vocals. This meant me getting all the drum and bass parts–the rest of ‘the band’ —all tracked and in order to make his recording process as easy as possible.
He came for a week last October, and we recorded like crazy, and had some fun exploring Nashville as well. After Keith left, it was time for Sabine and I to add back up vocals….Erin also added a back up vocal to one of the songs (she recorded in California where she and Keith were hanging out for awhile on his trip). It just seemed fitting that she should sing on something. I finished adding some final instrumental parts that were inspired by Keith’s tracks, and we added some great harp (harmonica…not the big tall frame of strings) provided by another Nashvillian named Danny Garrett who I’d met at the Bowery Vault… he has a really cool approach to the instrument. I edited, mixed and mastered everything during the cold winter months here in Nashville, and today…it’s alive!!
Congratulations on completing Three Score and Ten—in multiple ways. 🙂
New music Friday, brought to you by Bourbon Friday and B3Pmusic.com we feature the young and talented Stella Miller…. We’ve featured a few of her songs because she’s just writing all the time these days. She has just started her first year at USC in Southern California, so it will be interesting to see if the LA life changes her music as she transitions from life as a high schooler in the Bay Area.
With some of the songs that Stella sends along, I come up with all the instrumental stuff which I build around her demo and ideas based on playlists that stylistically describe what she is looking for. She is also very organized and has ‘maps’ of the songs that she sends along. Then I send tracks over to Steve Glaze at Tone Freq in the Bay Area where he mixes and masters (Stella is Steve’s client, but I provide her with instrumental arrangements).
On this song, Steve sent me over what was sort of a ‘done’ song in most ways—it was a pretty acoustic thing, and mostly it was just her vocals and her playing acoustic guitar. There was one drone note in there too that goes through the whole song. What I did for this one was to come up with a gentle, rolling drum part (mallets) to come in about halfway through the song to help propel it to the end.
Now of course, neither Stella or I usually stop with just the initial idea. I thought a super simple bass line could come in with the drums… And then, well some simple electric guitar parts too, of course. I also added in a pad that comes in on the second verse. Then I sent the session back to Steve, and he did his thing.
I have a great relationship with Steve, and he sends me stuff from artists he’s working with to add things to, and when I’m in CA working with artists, that is where we go to track their vocals and any other parts they may like to add.
Anyway…enjoy this really pretty song from this prolific up and coming young artist–another nice one Stella!
New music Friday, brought to you by Bourbon Friday and B3Pmusic.com is featuring Paul Felton today. He’s releasing a number of things right now, so as we are featuring his song that released just 2 weeks ago, Tinderbox, a brand new one came out today! Can’t keep up with Mr. Felton…haha….
Tinderbox is one of his smokey, jazzy pieces, but I didn’t want to make it too derivative, so there are elements that one wouldn’t find in a kind of lounge-y song like this… there are a number of ‘Americana’ elements to it as well, including Jessie Nestor’s super cool floating lap steel parts, and the low, melodic single note guitar part that I played. It also features Sabine Heusler-Schick’s angelic back up vocals. Christine Moad added the great bass line, drums and organ were your’s truly. Dig Paul’s smokey vocals on this one, and his literary, poetic lyrics. This one will certainly pair well with a nice bourbon on this Bourbon Friday! Have a pour and listen more! Check out Paul’s newest offering that came out today as well…. We’ll feature that one soon!
New music Friday again…. I had numerous artists I’ve been working with release new music this past Friday, and I wasn’t sure the order to put things, but since I’m in the Bay Area this week and was here to attend the EG Phillips memorial event, we are going to feature his latest release, ‘The Duck Song’. For those that know EG, the ‘duck’ theme goes deep with him(his web site is duckwithpants.com – go check it out).
This song is not about actual ducks, but rather, it is about an Australian gang that inhabited San Francisco in the mid 1800s— they were blamed for an 1849 fire that devastated SF among other things(those darn criminal Australians!). It was important to him that the words ‘cheap canvas trousers’ in the second line of the song be clear to allude to his passion for ‘ducks with pants’….haha.
This is the third single from his latest collection that has popped without his physical presence here to share and enjoy these releases—it sure makes me sad he’s not here to be part of all this, but at least he was able to schedule these songs to release before leaving for us so that we can enjoy them despite his absence. This song, like others, features some of Nashville’s finest: Mark Robertson on bass, and Justin Moses on mandolin, joined by yours truly on acoustic guitar, resonator guitar, percussion/drums, and backing vocals.
One fun thing percussion wise…a lot of it is pretty simple—just a kick with maybe some patterns on the rims, etc., but as I was trying to decide what to do in that regard, I was slapping out the rhythms on my knees….. as I did that, I noticed I liked the sound, so I dropped a mic right over my lap and recorded it.
On this song, the entire solo section had been mandolin, but EG mentioned he wanted it to maybe move to another instrument midway through, so I found a lick that Justin played that I could sneak in on as a unison, and then split off to finish out the section on acoustic guitar.
Grab a beverage on this Friday and give this a spin—maybe since most of these Aussies were Irish descent, an Irish Whiskey is a good choice. I’ll stick to bourbon nonetheless.
Cheers to you EG, and thank you for these great songs!
New Music Friday, in association with Bourbon Friday, a subsidiary of B3PMusic.com, brings you this week’s featured artist, Julie Simpson and her new song ‘Spam’. We are hoping for some bourbon infused Spam….
Julie, who has been our feature a few times due to her prolific nature, works in a bunch of styles, and she seems to write either serious songs, or funny ones. Just the title of this one should tell you which side of her ever swinging emotional pendulum this one lies. Yup…it’s serious….seriously funny, that is.
Julie’s songs come to me fairly well formed most of the time, so a lot of the parts are already done and it is my job to pout additions elements and mix/master. Her husband and awesome guitarist Joe Simpson always has some tasty treats ready for consumption … this song is no exception with its meaty guitar riffs.
Adding the beefy low end is frequent collaborator Scot Larsen, and on the drumsticks is the ever flavorful Mike Freitas. From the (meat) production standpoint, I often get these sessions from Mike, who has set up a Pro Tools session with his drum parts in place, and then Julie sends her parts along which I import into the session. They will contain midi and acoustic drums/percussion. Often, Mike will play the main parts on his E kit and provide midi, which I like a lot, as it allows me to pick the perfect drum sounds for the songs—his normal acoustic kits are more rock or jazz oriented, neither quite the right ingredients for this song.
This song had horn ideas in place, and often, Julie has me use those ideas to work with and elaborate on. In the case of this song, she’d used some loops (that were real trumpets/brass) and some stuff she played using virtual horns. I thought the parts were great and done really, so in this case, I integrated what she had by layering in sax, and I edited the brass midi and used my own personal libraries…. Because of the parts, they sounded pretty convincing, as is not always the case with midi stuff…. Once the sax was in there, it all sounded like the perfect blend of meat products. Then I put it in my big ol’ vat and mixed it all up into a delectable end product.
Sit back and have a good giggle with this song….pairs nicely with bourbon, wine, and many other beverages.
Our featured artist today is new to B3PMusic — Reigneth is her name, and her music is super cool. I met her at the Bowery Vault awhile back, and she came to me with a song that she had started working on at her end. She got to a point where she felt she needed help to get it over the finish line, and that is one thing I specialize in. Her music is very much about the words…it’s kind of spoken word or poetry vibe, and when she performs, it’s usually just with simple acoustic guitar or keyboard backing….the feature is the story and the words, thus the vocal forward mix.
Even though it has electronic beats and such, she still wanted it to have that bedroom songwriter vibe—a certain rawness. The project she sent me that she’d been working on in Audacity (I believe) was very beat driven—in fact, it was mostly the beat with the vocal parts, and then some long drones very quiet in the background. What was most important to tackle was getting the beat to sound right with the melody…. The rhythms were all good, and in fact, I don’t know that I changed any of that. The kick had such a tonality to it, and it was not really in the key of the melody, so I ended up converting her beat into midi on my end, then aligning the notes where they needed to be to trigger the right sounds. It was mostly a matter of getting sounds that were similar to what she had, but that didn’t fight the melody.
After that, I wanted to get some instrumental stuff to denote the chords, but I wanted to keep it sparse so as not to interfere with the words and beat. There were a few sections toward the end that had these empty spaces, and I liked the space between words, so I composed a ‘soundscape’ to connect the parts. It felt like making a scene in a film as much as making a song.
Reigneth’s original vocals, cut in her apartment, were fine, but we decided to cut the lead vocal with the new vibe and atmosphere in place. The rest of the vocals were out of her demo session—I liked the spirit and vibe of them, so they stayed.
The record scratchy kind of sound was also part of the beat from the demo. We had a fun time making this…check it out! It’s something a bit different. Remember, ‘Have a pour, and listen more’!
It’s Friday again, and today we are featuring Rick Merritt for a ‘Flashback Friday’ edition. It was hard for me to pick a particular song for today, as Rick has a lot of great songs….. his body of work is often softly reflective… his songs paint scenes. His style and writing reside in the realm of the traditional singer songwriter…I would mention names like James Taylor and Paul Simon when I try to describe his influences. Like these artists, Rick shares a unique and careful guitar approach to his songs—I always really love the attention to the guitar he gives, and the really cool, well done compositions.
Rick’s music often has a ‘solitary’ feel to it, and I most enjoy it by myself at quiet times. We did 2 albums together, and for some reason, when I search for them on streaming, they turn up as if in 2 different artist profiles (but with his name). I am choosing ‘Real Love’ for today’s song from his second album, ‘She Makes My Heart Dance’, but I also strongly suggest finding his first album, ‘Colors’(which has a few of my favorite songs of his, ‘St. Pancras Station’ and ‘Mile Marker 209’). I chose ‘Real Love’, as it’s one of the bigger productions I did for him, and with these Friday posts, we are not only sharing great songs, but the production we do here at B3PMusic.
This song starts with just Rick and his guitar—much like his more stripped down work—but then it builds into a nice full band arrangement…sort of the way love, or a relationship might build. The build begins adding in Nashville trumpeter Nick Haynes, and then builds into a full band thing…I did the drums and percussion, the bass, a subtle electric guitar part, and I got to do a really fun sax solo as well that starts out as a ‘conversation’ with Rick. Mixed and mastered by your’s truly too…
I couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been out here in the studio since 5:30 listening to Rick’s music…it is such a great walk down memory lane, and I love the music I got to work on with Rick. I heartily recommend checking out this song, but I also suggest that you continue listening to all the songs, and find the ‘Colors’ album as well.
Today’s new music Friday is from Paul Felton who is releasing his very first album! Using Paul’s own words: ‘this isn’t just about a debut record. It’s a reminder that it’s never too late to share your voice’.
What Paul means by this is that he did not make this collection of songs as a youngster—he graduated from Austin Peay State University with a music education degree in 1975, and has owned his own landscaping business for 34 years, and is now finally getting around to releasing a collection of songs!
I met Paul quite a number of years ago now at the Bowery Vault. He stood out, as his backing instrument for his songs is the autoharp— not too common to see songwriters using one of those instead of a guitar or keyboard.
Paul’s songs are what I’d call ‘literary’…. He likes to use colorful language to ‘paint’ images like one would find in a novel. One artist I compare him to is Leonard Cohen. Paul is also a great supporter of the local music scene and can often be seen around town attending shows in support of fellow songwriters. In addition, Paul runs a monthly gathering for songwriters at his house called ‘Paul Jam’.
The first single that was released just today in called ‘Two Doors Down From Hell’, and it also happens to be the first song we worked on together. Working from Paul’s demo of vocal and autoharp, I created this jazzy piece, and on this song, I played all the instruments. On other songs, we also brought in some great players from here in town.
Paul’s demo had a lounge-y, swingy feel to it, so that is the direction I took with the production. It is always fun to get to pull out my sax for a song too, as so much stuff I do is more guitar based. I didn’t want to make this a traditional swing song, so I incorporated some more modern elements, particularly with the guitar parts. And we get to hear some of Sabine Heusler-Schick’s sassy back up vocals.
I will enjoy this with a bourbon later, but…a glass of merlot would be appropriate too….(listen to the song and you’ll understand….). Congratulations Paul!!
EG Phillips’ songs are arriving like ghosts that he has left behind for us to enjoy…. But I can’t shake the sadness that he has left us with just these spirits of his labors to ponder.
As many may know, EG left us unexpectedly in early June just weeks after the completion of his latest body of work that is now unveiling itself slowly (I didn’t know it, but apparently he did get this sequence of releases lined up before he passed). Last Friday, single number 2 popped up on streaming.
As the producer of this collection, I am assuming the responsibility of making sure his outstanding work gets recognized, as he’s not here to do it, and it breaks my heart that he does not get to experience these babies of his being ‘born’ into the world. Something is missing without his words to talk about these songs. I’ll do my best, but he was the wordsmith… This second single, ‘All Bad Things Blur Together at the Border’, is more in line with the rest of the collection than was the first stripped down single that came out just after his passing (it was lyrically very haunting given EG’s untimely passing, particularly in that it mentioned the location he was found).
EG was going for a more acoustic Americana thing with more a bluegrass band kind of feel. He had me hire some real Nashville hotshots for this project, and we get to hear them all here on this song. On mandolin is Justin Moses, an uber talented local musician(and husband of Sierra Hull). On fiddle is the ever awesome Amberly Rosen, and on double bass is the magnificent Mark Robertson (Legendary Shack Shakers, JD Wilkes and the Dirt Daubers, Eskimo Brothers, and many other great bands). I am humbly joining them on guitar, drumm-y things, and backing vocals. All these songs were so much fun to construct—often, this type of music would be cut live all at once, but we were trying different things and deciding what needed to be added as we went along.
I hope y’all get to enjoy this music—music and writing were what EG was all about, and I’m honored to have been a part of helping him create so many of his quirky and clever little babies…. Give this new single a spin!
For this Flashback Friday, we are featuring Brad Sanzenbacher — I love all his music — he is just a great lyricist….always very clever, sometimes humorous, sometimes just deeply serious.
Today’s pick is one of the humorous ones, ‘Let’s Go Write Waltzes’. We wanted it to sound a bit ‘drunk’ and screwed up, so you will some whacky fiddle playing by the great and expressive Amberly Rosen, and some very sick sounding Salvation Army sounding horns…. I chose an old time-y drum sound to also sound a bit like a Salvation Army band plodding away in the alley…. Brad and I did some babbling talking to each other … I don’t remember if alcohol was involved or not…. The goal here was to be irreverent and loose, like the lyrics. I did all the instruments except the fiddle on this one, and as usual, the mixing and mastering….
It was always fun to approach these songs, as I’d often need to take a different approach to the (acoustic) guitar than I might for my own music…. The heart (or starting point) of most of his songs were his vocal and the guitar, so I’d make sure the song could stand with just his vocal and guitar if it had to. I worked against a scratch vocal, which would be replaced by a final at the end. Once I had a guitar part in place with the scratch, the drum parts and sound would really become important, as the feel and tonality are always paramount to me, whether it be simple like this, or complex and flashy. Now that said, I will most often get the feel in my head, come up with drums and percussion first, then lay down the rest….but I kind of remember doing guitar first with some of these….(hey…I’ve done a million songs since then, and even though I have a good memory for stuff, some of this history is prone to misremembering…lol).
Like most music, the vocals and the ‘heartbeat/feel/rhythm’ are the bosses….then I like to flavor with just the right spices. I fully recommend checking out all of Brad’s catalogue…. He is one of those writers whose wordplay always impresses me and moves me…the kind of writer who makes me wish I’d written those lines…
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.
