A couple more Rough Edges tracks

Well, there's a couple more copies of Rough Edges out in the world, so I might as well get on with the business of doing the liner notes. Tonight, I'll tell you about tracks three and four.

3 - The Train Song

This was inspired in part by the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, but the musical form came from a TV show I was watching on PBS one night. It featured a group of women folk singers, and included the Indigo Girls, Holly Near, and several others. I liked the way the songs tended to be put together. I especially liked the light touch they used to get their points across. It was gentle, thoughtful music and so much of mine at the time seemed heavy-handed in comparison.

It's in a standard tuning, but capoed on the third fret. The little opening theme is from Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train," so credit where credit is due. I couldn't resist putting it there. I hope Ms. Cotten's estate will be satisfied with a small percentage of the vast profits I've realized off the six or seven copies I've sold so far. ;>

4 - Speaking In Tongues

The long title for this is "My Fingers are Speaking in Tongues." Lyrically speaking, it's pretty self-explainatory. The music came from a warm-up exercise I came up with that makes use of a lot of 'tone clusters.' That's where you take a chord form usually used in the first three frets of the guitar and shove them up and down the neck. Cool stuff.

Both of these songs differ from most of this collection, in that they were recorded at New Sherriff Studios in Laconia, NH. I believe this facility is now defunct, as the Sherriff, one Dave Marsh, has left the area. Too bad. Very generous and talented guy. He was part of a three-piece project called MD2, which put out one CD. Musically, it's kind of in a little grey area that resides between New Age, mellow Techno, and soft jazz. It was a sax player, a percussionist, and Dave on electronic stuff. He helped turn Greenlaw's Music in Laconia back into a serious music store. Anyway, I recorded these two songs and the opener, "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins," at his place.