Coming Attractions

I made in Nashville with Thomm Jutz a few years back. I’m hoping to raise some money to get the record manufactured, promoted and out in the world where it belongs. I’ve slowly come around to being convinced it’s worthy of the effort and expense. I hope you’ll think so too. Thomm is amazing. He’s since become a multiple Grammy® award nominee. I felt pretty good about the songs I took to his studio but really had no real idea what I was walking into. I didn’t know who the players would be -or even who they were -until after they drove off after three and a half hours. Thomm and I played all the guitars. Thomm sang all the background harmonies. The session band was a killer: Dave Francis on acoustic and upright bass, Lynn Williams on drums and percussion and “utility man” Justin Moses -on fiddle, banjo and Dobro. Wow.

I hope to raise enough funds to release the record with new packaging, ready for digital play and tracking -and to have enough of a budget to promote it effectively to a broader audience. I’ll be snazzing up my web page, making some new videos, and generally, get my house in better order. The record a few of you may know from home-made copies -called “The View From Mt. Juliet” -has been retitled “Blue Tuxedo.” The record also contains “Bluebonnet Girl” -a song I wrote for Ramona that, incredibly enough, my old friend and Nashville legend David Olney had adopted as his own in his last months among us. David learned the song from a preview copy of this same recording. There’s so much more to that story. I’ll be adding a link or two to fill in more of the details.

I plan to reissue my out-of-print first record “Then There’s That…” -hoping that the promotion efforts on behalf of “Blue Tuxedo” might stir some interest in these lost tracks. I hoping, as well, to lay the groundwork for recording a wave of new songs I’m getting excited about.

In the years since its recording, this record has been accruing some rather extraordinary mojo, Besides the extraordinary David Olney story, it’s been praised by some of my musical heroes, including some of my Nashville songwriting heroes Thom Schuyler, Craig Bickhardt, Don Henry, Jack Sundrud and Tony Arata, all of whom I’ve had the honor of swapping songs with on stage at a number of Bluebird Cafe-style In-The-Round concerts

The Nashville tracks exist only on home-burned copies made for friends, but an official recording has never been out there with all the metadata and other things necessary to have the songs available to be played on digital streaming platforms like Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and others.