I'll be providing the music for this fancy dinner in the high desert in Sun Alley on April 5. Make your reservations by emailing [email protected].  Twiggy will be playing upright bass with me.  A portion of proceeds benefit Sparks Growth for Childrens' Literacy. 

Coming up over the next few weeks, I have three amazing shows between the high desert and the Los Angeles area.

Saturday, February 23 at Landers Brew Co. near Joshua Tree, CA.  Moody Little Sister joins the Saturday night fray at Landers Brew for this month's last Urban Desert Cabaret.  Joe Garcia bookends the evening.  I'll also be playing a set before Moody Little Sister takes the stage for their Mojave Desert premiere.  I am so excited to have these friends play our little town.  I first met them in Portland.  Now they live in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.  They took great care of us there.  Let's show them a good time here.

Friday, March 1 at The Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles.  We're playing this legendary club opening for the equally legendary Todd Albright. Todd is a Country Blues, finger-style guitar player and singer living in Detroit, Michigan. He's a man out of time... or at least, quite possibly, from another time.  Twiggy Pop will be joining me on upright bass.  Join us and Todd for an evening of rolling on the Mississippi River and desert winds.

Tuesday, March 5 at Matt Denny's in Arcadia - The Songwriter Serenade.  My good friend, Rags & Bones, played this evening a couple of months back.  I happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped in.  What an amazing evening!  J.C. Hyke puts this weekly series together featuring singer-songwriters from all over Southern California and beyond.  It's so important for songwriters and musicians to have a night like this that puts us all together - both artists and audience.  J.C. is building a community one brick, or one song, at a time.  I'm honored to have a chance to play this evening.  I'm looking forward to meeting the other folks on the bill and becoming a brick in this community.

I wrote a small piece for Billboard magazine about Crooked Rain's long journey to the center of my heart.  It's one of the coolest, and weirdest records from any time period.  The article compiles the thoughts of a number of people whom the album impacted including Lilly Hiatt, Larry Crane, Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn and Aaron Lee Tasjan.

It was an honor and a pleasure to work on this album.  Available today on vinyl and digital.  Read about the recording and mixing here.  Get the album direct from Beluga or play it on your favorite digital platform.

Susan Kearns' curated show opens Friday, February 1 in Joshua Tree, California at Gallery 62.  The show is titled SURFACES. Susan has six paintings displayed that were inspired by songs from my upcoming album, Down In The Wash, including the painting pictured above which is the front cover. The other artists in the show are Joanna Szachowska, Tobi Taboada, Michael Maxwell, Alane Levinsohn, Eric Banas and Francesca Spoonhower.  In addition to oil painting, there is sculpture, assemblage, encaustic painting and more celebrating texture and how artists apply surface manipulation to their art form.  There is an OPENING PARTY on February 9 from 6pm to 8pm.  Come on by!  Musical surprises might happen.

See more of the art here and get details for the opening party:
https://www.facebook.com/events/1188584121307900/

I am excited to announce I have a new album that will be released May 14, 2019 by Astro Lizard Records.  There are eleven songs and the album's title is Down In The Wash.  I'll be sharing the album's cover art next week on this blog.  In the meantime, you can listen to the very first single from Down In The Wash.  It's titled Mojave Moonlight and it's available on the compilation album Euro House Concert Hub: Looking for Europe Collection from The Medicine Show Records. It's Track #4.

Later this spring, we'll be kicking off the album's release with a UK tour.  Hold tight!  Dates coming soon! 

This week, The L.A. Record ran an interview with Terry Six (Terry & Louie, The Exploding Hearts) and Ardavon Fatehi who is the director for an impending feature-length documentary about The Exploding Hearts.  Reading the interview was like taking a time machine back to 2003.  It sure sounded like Adam Baby was in the room.  I should also note that the article was written by Clorox Girl, Justin Maurer. 

I hope you take the time to read the whole article.  I think it will make you laugh.  It will help you remember what punk rock was like before everyone had a camera in their pocket.  There's also a little bit of information in the article about one of my own projects.  I'll be telling you more about that soon.  Meanwhile, enjoy the picture below.

I produced and engineered this album from one-time Timbuk 3 frontman, Pat MacDonald at my sixteen track Portland basement recording gutter, Studio 13.  We began tracking in October or November of 2005 and wrapped up mixes early in 2006.  Both Pat and I were going through some rough times.  We were both ending long term relationships.  Take a listen.  You can hear the pain coming off the Troubadour's performance.  You can hear the darkness in my mixes and production.  Almost all of what you hear is Pat MacDonald laying down a live performance in his one man band format.  The drum sound is Pat's home-made stomp box construction - a wood box with a D-112 kick drum mic inside.  The mic was run through guitar effect pedals and sent to an amplifier.  I took it DI and I mic'd the cabinet.  We would occasionally double track a vocal or add some percussion or hand claps.  An Ibanez AD202 was my main delay used for this album. It was released in 2007.  This album came from some really dark days.  But I'm so happy I got to spend that time with Pat MacDonald.  We made some great music.

iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/troubadour-of-stomp/291780642
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/3BbQK4c3bpmJq2IAExtiTF

Back in 2007, The Clorox Girls released an album called J'Aime Les Filles which I produced, engineered and mixed at my short lived studio, The Color Lab in Portland, OR.  The Color Lab was in the old Paramount Films building and included a film vault that was used as an echo chamber.  I wish I had that studio for a longer time. 

It sure is nice to find out that twelve years later, instrumental tracks are still finding their place on the internet.  Here's an instructional video that demonstrates how to make your own crotch bulge.  Perfect use for a song called Stuck in a Hole.  But I still think they should have used Banana Split from the same album. 

This one hasn't quite hit the streets yet, The Reverberations newest album, Changes, is out officially on February 7, 2019.  But you can hear the first single from these Portland psychedelic rockers by watching the video for So Strange.  And the video is really, really good!  It has a cool story featuring the band and rhythm guitarist John Jenne's son in the lead role with the added bonus of sweet and cheesy special effects.   Plus, if you're a fan of British Invasion bands, you're sure to recognize a few homages to promos and movies from that era.  I spot a number of nods to The Beatles.  But I also think I'm seeing a rip from The Kinks' Dead End Street promo.

The Reverberations chief songwriter and lead guitarist, Dave Berkham recently informed me that we have known each other for ten years!  I went to see his band, The Midnight Callers, at the short-lived Chaos Cafe on SE Powell Blvd in Portland, OR, a full decade ago just last week.  Dave and I have become good friends over the years. It was an honor to get to record and mix Changes. Dave and I have been plotting this album for a long time.  We worked on a single with The Callers years ago, but it was a quick collaboration.  With The Reverberations' album, we got to dig in. Changes was all of us, The Reverberations and me, working together at 100% to make a record that already existed in our minds.  Since we were making a psychedelic record, that left a lot of room for experimentation.

Let me tell you about the process.  First off, I no longer live in Portland, OR, or have a studio there.  Dave called me up sometime in the summer of 2017 at my home; a small, remote, 500 square foot solar powered cabin in the Mojave Desert.  He asked about what options we would have for recording together.  There were two options;  I could come up to Portland and we could work in one of the studios up there or we could get a vacation rental out here in the desert and we would use my mobile recording rig.  The Reverberations opted for five days of tracking at a house we rented in Joshua Tree.

Dave sent practice recordings of the songs we were planning to record.  The songs were excellent to begin with.  And even more interesting, there were transitions between the songs.  Some sounded intentional, some sounded unintentional because guitars were feeding back.  I mentioned to Dave that I really liked what was happening.  The Reverberations performed these songs in the proposed album order for the short tour they had planned on their way to Joshua Tree from Portland. 










Arriving on a Sunday afternoon, we tracked Monday through Friday.  The band also slept in the house.  Guitar amps were set up in the kitchen and laundry room.  I took the Nord keyboard direct.  The bass amp was behind a couch we set up for playback listening (behind John, Ian and Bob in the photo above).  And we set up the drums where the master bed had been.  This room had a raised wood floor and wood paneling!  Ian's drums, the same vintage of Slingerland that John Bonham used on Led Zeppelin I, sounded... well, just like Bonham in that room!  We followed up with a day and a half of tracking in The Reverberations' rehearsal spot in Portland, using a smaller version of my mobile rig.

I mixed Changes at my solar powered cabin sporadically between February and April of 2018.  I would send mp3 mixes to the band. We honed the mixes until the album was finished.  I used a lot of analog compression including a UREI 1176, Chandler LTD-2s and a Distressor. All of the delays that you hear are analog as well; a Space Echo, the trusty Ibanez AD202 and others.  The flanging and phasing in the mix was done by hand.  I didn't use any plug-ins or pedals.  It was accomplished by splitting a signal into two different paths and manipulating the timing and pitch of one or both of the paths. There's a fair amount of backwards tracking on the album, like the cymbal at the top of So Strange.

The Reverberations' Changes hits the street February 7, 2019.  It will be available on vinyl by Beluga Records and on all digital platforms.

All photos are from The Reverberations Joshua Tree recording session.  Top photo L to R: Cam, Dave, John, Ian, Bob. Middle photo L to R: Bob, Dave and Ian.  The drum room is to the right of the photo. Bottom photo is the mobile recording rig.