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There is an interesting history to how this album came to be. The great players you hear on the songs are my band-mates of many years from our Beatles-tribute band called "Glass Onion". Songs are available for download on iTunes and Amazon.com, or order the album here. Song lyrics are here.
In 2001, I had been away from music for quite a bit of time and really desired to record original music again. But I never had a good band to record with, so always resulted to doing the instruments using digitally sampled instruments through computers. I really wanted a real band performance feel this time. But the only way it could work is if the band was really tight. And the only way to do that would be to be playing together for a while. Not being very hopeful (because it is very difficult to find really good musicians to form a band), I started looking around the area and putting out feelers. Soon, as it turned out, there was a drummer (Doug Briggs), a bass player (Mike DeLaFleur) and a lead guitar player (Ted Seely) right in my own little town of Front Royal, VA, and all going to the same church that I attended. The chances of that, as many musicians will concur, are remote. I took it as a further good sign that all three were available and interested in forming a band. Now what? How do we make this fun and productive to become a tight band? We talked about it and decided we would rehearse every Friday night by playing Beatles songs. I had always wanted to play in a Beatles tribute band. And it turned out that we all loved the Beatles. So that was it. We would learn Beatles songs and practice every Friday night.
And we faithfully met every Friday night. After two years, we were actually really good at performing these Beatles songs. In fact, we felt good enough to get gigs. And we did. In September, 2003, we played our first paying gig at the Griffin Tavern in Flint Hill, VA. Seven years later, we are still playing there, and many other public venues and private parties. But what about the original purpose of forming the band? It just kept getting backburnered because of our success with Glass Onion. But finally in June 2009, I made the demos of the songs and got us in the studio. What you are listening to on this album is the result. I am so very grateful to Ted, Mike and Doug for giving me the most memorable years of my life as a musician, and helping me to accomplish this long-time dream of recording these songs. They had only one week to hear these songs for the first time and come up with parts for the studio. I think they did sensational for having so little time. I hope you agree. They are great guys, sound musicians and a joy to play music with. I hope to do more recording with them soon.
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