Middle age –
Some buy a motorbike or go skydiving, some swim with sharks or hunt for ancient treasures…. me I started to record all the songs I’d scribbled on little bits of paper over many years! As the technology made it infinitely easier to set up a studio at home… that’s what I did, and here am 😉 7 albums, two e.p.’s and a couple of compilation albums in 4 years, and many more still to come!!
Folk
Beneath the Surface of ‘Lost At Sea’
by Danny M. Cohen of They Won’t Win
My name is Danny M. Cohen, and I’m one half of the Chicago-based gay folk-rock duo They Won’t Win. My “music husband” is Greg Lanier and we wrote and co-produced our debut album over a few years of life’s ups and downs. For me, parts of ‘Lost At Sea’ reflect what it was like to witness a dear friend fall into a dark, frightening place, but, ultimately, our album is about finding your way out.
Islands In Mind
by Eldafyre
I live in a small house. High on a forested mountain. It rarely snows during the winter. I drive long distances to see the entire country sometimes. I eat alone in vast naturistic scenarios. However, I have a deeply loving companion.
Finding Music: Following the Concussion
by David Summit
I hear music in my head; it writes itself for me. It feels as if I have been dialed into a radio frequency of sounds, words, images and stories, and my body is just the antenna. My life from that moment on became who I was before and who I am now.
Heartfelt and Light-Hearted
by Al Barnes
I grew up in a small town in Minnesota called Elbow Lake. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the “sticks” of MN, so I found love in rock ‘n’ roll at an early age through my older brother’s music collection. He moved out when I was young, joined the Air Force and was stationed in England when I was in middle school, so our family took a trip overseas to see him. When I got there, he showed me his electric guitar. I picked it up, and he showed me a couple of licks. I played that damn thing the rest of the time I was there. My parents heard me playing it the whole weekend and later that year, for Xmas, I got my first guitar. I was obsessed. I quit all sports and just focused on that.
How We Forgot To Plan Ahead and Got Stuck With This Band Name
Hello friends. We are from the prairies of southern Alberta where it is sparse and dry, kind of like us. We don’t know what we’re doing or what we want, but we think we will continue. Join us as we try not to suck, but also don’t worry too much about being great. We’re just trying to be ok.
Help me, I’m happy
What do you do when you’re in love with two people?
How about when your attempts to make a difference in the world fall flat?
Rocky Mountain Beauty
by Haley Harkin
Upon driving into Rocky Mountain National Park, the first thing we spotted was a moose.
Hide and/or Seek
My second album is somewhat of a time capsule. These are the songs I wrote between realizing I needed to get better and doing something about it.
My alcoholism and dependence on other addictive behaviors (weed, sex, etc.) had progressed to a point where they had begun destroying every semblance of a good life I’d managed to build despite them. To preserve any chance I had at living well, I needed to change the way I spent each and every moment of my time. In order to honestly document these in musical form, I stripped away every instrument other than my voice, guitar, laptop, and tape recorder.
If there is anything for you in these songs, you will most likely find it outside of what I have to say about them. All I really have to say is thank you so, so much for listening. So much.
That said, in case it might inform your listening, here’s what I have to say:
I Went To The Desert And Held Out My Thirst
The different settings for my latest album, Desert Cities – Part One, span from Denver to Seoul. Track three, Brooklyn, is a love song for the gritty and enigmatic Bushwick neighborhood and track four, Coming Home, rides the metro north to Midtown where home is not a place but a person (and a lovely oasis at that). Track two, Lost in Seoul, reflects on the foreign shores of South Korea, “the crowded streets, the angry East Sea, don’t mind if I belong here for a while.”
Only track one, Hold out Thirst, mentions a dry, barren, lifeless, sandy desert. Its brief and stark first refrain, “I went to the desert and held out my thirst,” captured something much bigger in me when I first listened back to the completed album. The desert, in this case, is where one goes to reflect deeply, to test themselves against the elements, physically and emotionally and to experience thirst as a fundamental sensation of life, to feel acutely alive. The remainder of the album (part two included, TBR Fall 2019) is born of this same desire.