Listen

Hi. It's been a while since I posted anything about Tape and Glue as I've been writing some new songs and moving on, but I wanted to share a "leftover" track from the sessions... I had "Listen" around for a while and recorded demos of the song in various styles, trying to find the song. Once Dave came in to lay down this groove (which was in my mind, modeled after Peter Gabriel's Digging in the Dirt) the song came together. I had the horn line in my head forever and kind of scatted it to Erik Lawrence and Steven Bernstein who laid it down easily and with some great feel, with Erik doing a few solos between the lines. I sent Rob Strait the roughs of the tune and he sent me back about 8 guitar tracks with many different textures.... we ended up using just about all of them. That's Rob doing the swells, the bells and harmonics, the pulsing guitar in the second verse (which he did by manually playing the note and using the volume knob on the guitar as a volume pedal into an echo... no easy feat!!) When I heard the pulse guitar for the first time it made my day. I originally wanted a lot of voices for the background vocals at the end but I was never able to coordinate things to make it happen so I just layered them. I did a posting on this blog with video of those sessions here... it's hard to believe that was 2 years ago.. So, Happy Christmas to anyone reading this and if you need a last minute gift you can download/gift "Tape and Glue" for free here... If you are interested in having an unmastered copy of "Listen" shoot me an email and I'll send it out. Peace RD