Here we go there's nothing left to choose, here we go there's nothing left to loose....

The first time I heard Mat Kearney's "Nothing Left To Loose" I thought I was hearing a new Coldplay song and got very excited. I was even more excited when the DJ announced who it was and I thought - COOL - a new really good artist. The song has a very catchy melody, a chorus that kind of carries you along down the road as if you were on the best road trip on earth. "C'mon and we'll see, like we were free, push the peddle down, watch the world around fly by us, c'mon and we'll try one last time...here we go there's nothing left to choose, here we go there's nothing left to loose...". I have to say, this song was the basis for our soundtrack up the road and back to Seattle on our way to Alaska. It's a very powerful song when you listen to all of it's parts, with the top down, and you don't know where the hell you are in the middle of California....and then you've pulled into a very dark campsite at 11p and it's the edge of the state line on a back road you chose to take that barely made it on the state map....

After that road trip and hearing the song on every radio station on our way I had to get the CD. I found it used in Buffalo a couple of weeks later when I made my friends walk into their local record store. I was absolutely thrilled and couldn't wait to pop it into the nearest CD player. I admit at first I was a little thrown off guard by a few of the other songs. As my friend Laura and I drove down the highway to NYC I made her listen to it a couple of times but it wasn't until I got back to LA that I fully appreciated what this CD is about. It's an awesome mix of pop, folk and rap. Yes, I said rap, he uses it in a number of the songs, mostly on the chorus'. While it's disarming at first, it's really grown on me after repeated listenings and really adds to the material. It's as if he listened to Luka Bloom's The Acoustic Moterbike album and took it a few steps further. But what's cool is that there are other songs that don't have rap in them and are in a purist form in their delivery. With piano, cello and his hard to describe, but maybe he has a cold, voice, the song "Won't Back Down" settles the argument that maybe this cd is hard to take if you don't like the rap influence. Listen further. It's a truly beautiful song. "No Matter what comes crashing down I'm still going to stand my solid ground..." The song, as well as "Nothing Left to Loose", has been featured on Grey's Anatomy, so if you think you haven't heard this guy, think again. He's got a haunting sound despite the fact that he still reminds me of Coldplay. That's not the worst thing on the planet, that's for sure....

If you've been reading the last few week's entries you have heard me mention the new demo/EP I have been working on with my friend and Co-Producer, Rebecca, a classically trained pianist. I have not talked about it much here because it was something I wasn't sure was actually going to happen, or happen well. It started with my birthday dinner at La Boheme here in West Hollywood in September. It was a casual thing, 'hey - I wrote a couple new songs that I want to work on and see how they would sound with more than me and my acoustic.....will you swing by for an afternoon and lay down some tracks?...." She came by right before me and Abby left for Alaska and laid down some tracks...we both loved what we heard, got kind of jazzed and said ' hey - lets do a few more songs'. Suddenly, as a still unemployed person, I was buying recording equipment and putting it on my 'american dream' credit card. Holy Crap, I thought, what the hell did I just do? Can I return this equipment? Can I do this on Garageband and still be proud of it? No. I can't. I kept everything I bought and after some major computer issues we laid down the first scratch tracks on 11 November. In the month since we started fresh on the new software we have, as of last night, nearly completed 2 whole songs of the 5 that we are working on for this project. We have 3 more to go, or rather, once we import from Garageband the 2 songs we've done that still need a few tracks, we will be nearly there. It's an incredible process, I'm very happy with what we're doing, and I feel pushed to my limits as a guitar player, vocalist, and wanna-be bass player. Oh yeah, that. In a city full of musicians I am having a bear of a time finding a bass player to commit an afternoon to lay down the bass tracks for the 5 songs. While me and Rebecca are doing what we can to play the instruments we know how to play, neither of us is a bass player. My goal is to have as many live instrument tracks as possible. So I am putting it out there, in a moment when I feel like I have nothing left to loose, in more ways than can be expressed here, I am asking you, my reader, if you know of anyone who plays bass and would do it for a few beers, or a few shots of vodka (or both), please send them my way. SERIOUSLY. Because at this point..........

Thanks for tuning in....Until next Monday...CHEERS!!!