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To download a free MP3, click the image above.

“The Night is Dead” was completely written and recorded during May. Thanks for listening! I’d love to hear what you think.

The rest of this post is for the recording geeks. I’ve been recording my music in some form for more than 10 years. When you’ve recorded yourself as much as I have it’s easy to get in the habit of using the same mics in the same positions on the same instruments. You know it worked in the past, so it’s easy to repeat.

So for “The Night is Dead” I wanted to intentionally record in ways I don’t usually. Typically I start with drums, then layer in all the other instruments, only adding vocals once everything else is done. So this time I started by playing guitar and singing (I don’t usually play while singing). I chose a different acoustic guitar than I usually use for recording – it’s a smaller, janglier sounding guitar. For the rest of the instruments I tried to use mics I wouldn’t usually choose in places I wouldn’t usually put them.

The drums were probably the most different. I limited myself to kick drum, snare, and hi-hats. That eliminates two toms and two cymbals compared to what I usually play. I only used two mics on the drums. One in front of the kick, and one about one or two feet above the snare slightly slanted toward the hi-hats. This is the first time time in about six years that I haven’t used a pair of overheads for a stereo image of the drums, and I may start recording drums in mono more often! I really like the way it came out.

To download a free MP3, click the image above.

Since I started offering monthly downloads, the is the first one that was completely written, recorded, and mixed specifically for the site. I started on it half way through April.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

During the summer of 2008, I recorded an album for my friends, Scandaliz Vandalistz. It was recorded at two different apartments here in Memphis (one mine, one theirs), and it was a lot of fun to make. They just recently made the album available as a free download on their website. Go download it and enjoy!

Scandaliz Vandalistz – Home to Roost

PS – My new song for May is coming VERY soon!

To download a free MP3, click the image above.

This month’s song is a collaboration with Nikkita Cohoon. Nikki is an artist, writer, and one of my wife’s closest friends. A while back I suggested setting some of her poetry to music, and she sent me a few options. The words of this song come directly from one of those poems. I enjoyed writing music for something that wasn’t originally intended to have a musical element. I tried to capture the disorienting feeling of being unexpectedly woken in the night.

The song also features Matt Bell (a friend of both me and Nikki), whom you can hear sharing vocals with me. For interested Memphians, Matt leads a monthly Sacred Harp singing at Evergreen Presbyterian Church. You can contact him at invisiblegardener@gmail.com

This month’s original artwork is again by Lindsey Glenn using an old family photo.

Here is the full text of Nikki’s poem:

My late grandfather calls at 2 a.m.

The pattern of inset circles swells
in my voice—phonemes caught
on the haunches of my longing.
Your words full of echoes and static.

And in your voice phonemes catch
dust and solar wind. The phone chord jostles
your words (full of echoes), and static
struts my throat. Your voice is also

Dust. Solar. Wind. The phone chord jostles
memory, I have not stopped
the struts that line my throat, your voice—also
memories. The proof of our correspondence:

memory. I have not stopped
on the haunches of my long
memory: the proof of our correspondence,
the pattern of. Inset—circles, swells.

To download a free MP3, click the image above.

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UPDATE (3/12/11): By request I’m adding a little background on this song. It sort of pieced itself together over a long period of time, pulling inspiration from some pretty diverse sources. Last November, after watching my favorite movie, Fantastic Mr. Fox I immediately recorded the music that became the first minute and a half of this song. I was finished in just a couple of hours. There were no drums yet, no lyrics, and none of the outro you hear after about 1:40 into the song. You could say that in my head, it SOUNDED the way Fantastic Mr. Fox LOOKS:

I was going to leave the song as an instrumental and call it “If What I Think is Happening, IS Happening” after my favorite line in the movie.

Then I started thinking about posting it for January’s download, so I wrote the lyrics and recorded the drums, but I felt like it needed something more. That’s when I recorded a version of what became the outro based on the song “Can You Get to That” by Funkadelic. But it came out sounding TOO much like that song, so I put it on hold to finish later. I got back to it last month and changed up the outro’s melody. The last piece of the puzzle came after reading Romans 7:15-19:

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

I added the outro lyrics based on that, and I thought it tied everything else together.

So, start with a Wes Anderson stop-motion animated film based on a book by Roald Dahl. Add a song from a 1971 Funkadelic album. Top it off with a quote from The New Testament. Mix all that together and apparently it comes out sounding like “Not Always (But Almost)”

To download, click the image above.

I originally wrote “Don’t Let Her Balance Sway” around 6 years ago. I’ve tried recording it a few times, but Ive never been happy with the results. But I really like the song and wanted to record a version I’m happy with. I think I usually try to make it more musically complicated than it needs to be, so I decided to keep it simple this time. I gave myself one rule: start and finish recording it in one day, by myself. I spent last Monday recording, and it wound up being my favorite version of the song. The intro/outro/musical interludes are new, but the guts of the song are the same as when I first wrote it.

Cover art by Lindsey Glenn.

Preview the song here:

To download, click the image above.

This month’s song is called “Pillar of Fire.”  The title and subject matter come from the Book of Exodus, chapters 13 and 14.  I actually recorded most of this song a few years ago, but it set unfinished until this month when I decided to dust it off and share it with you.

Cover art by Lindsey Glenn.

Check back for a new download each month, or follow me on twitter for updates.

Preview the song below:

It’s time to start spreading Christmas cheer, and I thought I’d do my part by offering a free Christmas song.

I had a great time recording this song last December. It combines two of my favorite holiday classics – “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “Auld Lang Syne” – so I’ve dubbed it “Have Yourself an Auld Lang Syne.”

You can download it for free.  Just click the artwork above.  Also be sure to sure to bookmark or subscribe to this site.  I plan to offer a new song as a free download at least once a month. I’ll also have a new album called Union, Reunion coming out in the spring of 2011.