I had a surprisingly good response (s) from my first music post yesterday, so, keeping with that whole strike-while-the-iron’s-hot thing, I am following it up with three more songs in today’s post..
I was working as a French Executive Chef in the Midwest in the early ‘90’s and I had the occasion to run into this band of ne’er-do-wells and malfeasant stoners: Guys like me without the Chef coat and medals.
Did I mention they played kickass rock and roll?
Next thing you know I am fronting this band and we are playing college bars in Bowling Green and Toledo, Ohio.
We were known as Bad Intent, drawing our name from a Jethro Tull lyric.
I wrote this song as a rock anthem to be played with a climbing (then dropping) badass lead guitar solo. It is titled Friends and I wrote it in 1992.
Check it out and seriously, you can’t hurt my feelings, so let me know.
Second up is a song about a place that played a very important part of my journey—Sedona, Arizona.
It’s almost like legendary Notre Dame football coach said, speaking of the university, “If you’ve already been there, no explanation is needed and if you haven’t, no explanation will suffice.”
Sedona’s like that.
As you drive north heading up Arizona Highway 89A, you first see the little desert bushes sprouting up, and as you ascend in to the San Francisco Peaks, now you are in a full-blown forest and you stand in a sea of white-skinned Aspen trees that illuminate the cold, crystal night like it was a perpetual early afternoon.
I wrote this song about visiting Oak Creek Canyon in Sedona in 1974 and living there in a cave we carved out of a rock ledge along Oak Creek at Grasshopper Point. It is called (surprise!) Sedona and I penned it in 1996 when I was training to be a General Manager for Cracker Barrel in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was on my way home after I completed training which was Tucson, Arizona at that time and I just started with the first lyric that came to my mind in this imaginary set of chords that was running through my head.
“Poison
That’s all that you are
And sweet-tasting poison at that.”
Let me know…
I end with one of my more recent efforts. It is called You Can’t Take Back and I wrote it only a couple years ago (2023). It is a bit “Pop-ish” but I dig it.
My inspiration for this song came from a girl who broke up with me and had the balls to ask me for the money I was saving for her engagement ring.
It was so outrageous I almost asked her to stay.
With no further adieux:
Stay well.
