I’ll be returning to the WCDB airwaves on the morning of Sunday, May 20. My new timeslot: 10am-noon Sundays! I hope you’ll join me… I love sharing music, even when I didn’t write it.

Still no word on whether the radio station will be open for overnight broadcasting. This is such a cowardly move by the UAlbany administration, and its timing is so suspect… handing down this “punishment” right before summer break is the equivalent of announcing bad news on a Friday. If these “Student Success” clowns think people are just going to forget and get over it, they’re as stupid as they are out of touch.

To their credit, the station staff has kept up the pressure and a ruling is supposedly forthcoming. Let’s watch closely.

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I want to thank the folks who bought Sevendys merch this past week to help with Chuck Rainey’s medical bills – very cool and generous of you guys. I’ve forwarded the proceeds right on to Chuck with my match, and I’ll keep the program going until further notice.

Again, if you would like to donate to Chuck directly, you can do so here.

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My next album is on track for a July release; I hope to make it available on CD and vinyl at that time. It’s twelve songs and seven are mixed. All but one are with the mix engineer, Pete deBoer, and he’s wrapping them up very efficiently.

It’s a weird record. The upbeat songs are very upbeat and the sad songs are very sad. I previewed the rough album for a friend and she cried at the end. Like real tears and everything. I thought it was maybe because she couldn’t stand to listen anymore – which was okay at that point because the record was over – but she said it was because the last two songs were that upsetting.

So I apologize in advance for whatever this album does to you.

Eschatone’s distributor requires a few months to properly set up an album, so while I’ll make it available here in all formats July, I would assume it won’t be in stores (if there still are actual record stores) until the fall. Not that this matters to you since you’ll be getting it the day I put it up on my site, right?

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I got Eschatone Records a PO box in Albany today. We’ll be closing down the New York City address and preparing our next round of releases as a bonafide 518 operation. I’m excited to be back with the company; I withdrew from the partnership in 2009 and returned late last year.

We have a plan and some really crazy stuff lined up to release this fall and winter. We’ll be experimenting with formats. We’ll be working with artists whose music will shock you. And we’ll be working with artists whose names will shock you, because you’ll be like How the fuck did they get that guy?

One genre into which I am excited to expand Eschatone is noise. I’ve been dabbling with Avi in our Space Toilets project… it’s fun and visceral, and the recordings, as abstract as they are, really do manage to say something. I think noise can be the ultimate musical metaphor – all feeling, no context, a direct emotional transmission. We’ll be putting out some stuff from Maryland’s Pregnant Spore; I am always surprised at how listenable his work is, and how much it communicates.

Thus even as Eschatone brings you new folk from Brian Dewan, it shall also put out staticky scrapey instrumental noise.

Come to think of it… there is an artist – a guitarist – whose work has long bridged the gap between the two; we’ve got him also. To be announced.

I don’t write too many “nice” songs. I don’t really see the point… if things are good, why waste time writing about ‘em when you could just be enjoying them?

But sometimes you just have to give props!

When your family’s not cutting it, friends get a free upgrade. I drew a shitty hand with the former but have been so lucky with the latter. Lisa Brennan alone is like an entire family in one beautiful little person. How did they fit all that awesome in there?!

After an early-aughts Collider show, a bunch of us ended up at the Moonstruck Diner on Second Avenue. I had some sort of mishap with my coffee and it spilled all over the saucer, making the bottom of my cup drippy. LB slipped a napkin between the cup and saucer when I wasn’t looking. Bryan Thomas saw her do it. He said: “Don’t let it go unnoticed.”

But it did. Mission accomplished, Lisa never said a word. I only found out about the makeshift doily years later. That’s the kind of person you want looking out for you.

“Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” was an easy song to wanna write, but tough to actually pull off. Especially for someone who is not used to writing positive lyrics! I was still slaving over it the week of the session, and even now I can only hope I got it right. Many of the words come straight out of LB’s t-shirt collection, including the title/closing refrain and the Engrish slogan from the tee on the right.

Production-wise, you are hearing one unedited live take with surprisingly few instrumental overdubs. Drums, bass, guitar, piano and congas were all tracked at once, in one room – Studio Three at EastWest in Los Angeles. That is the space where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds (hence the yellow-and-white-Cooper-Black-on-green single cover art… though it’s also a nod to the “Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” t-shirt, on which the slogan is set in Cooper Black for both the original and pizza-parody versions).

There are still two songs left to mix from the LA session; you’ll hear one of them soon. The other we’re saving for Christmastime. Next week Sevendys reconvenes in Woodstock to record five more tunes. Which reminds me… I’m supposed to be making charts right now. See you back here on Tuesday the 7th for my June Single of the Month!

I seem to be at a point in life where all of my public school classmates are getting divorced. There are so many custody battles being documented in real time on my Facebook wall right now… sorry to be a cavalier douche about this, but it’s actually pretty good reading. Definitely more interesting than what was for lunch, or how much Monday sucks.

If Facebook had existed when we were 27, our walls would have been splattered with breakup drama, followed by lots of engagement announcements six months later. It was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time… anyone whose relationship wasn’t the relationship ended it and married the next person he or she saw.

These are the people they’re divorcing now. Here’s a song for both sides.

Wait, what’s a Song Foundry Single Of The Month?

It’s how we’re gonna do things around here for a while. On the 7th of every month, you’re gonna get something new. It might be a Skyscape track, or Hanslick Rebellion, or a JD jam from the vaults that you’ve never heard before. Or, like this month, a brand-new solo studio track (finished yesterday!) with special guests Tony Levin, Anton Fig, Earl Slick, Maryann Fennimore, Mike Keaney and Ralph Carney. Listen, download, and please pass it on – if you like what you hear, share it on Facebook or elsewhere. That’s all I ask.

(Sevendys isn’t part of this. Sevendys is extra; Sevendys cannot be contained!)

It’s the Sevendys model that inspired this change: record, mix, release. Seems simple but it’s not. You have to actually record, mix, and then release. When you’re making full albums, it’s really hard to get to step three because first you have to record everything and then you have to mix everything. Waiting to track one last instrument on one last song? If that takes a year, then your whole album, all that work, sits in limbo for at least a year. Not a particularly efficient way to do things.

I like to work on six or seven albums at a time, slowly bringing them to completion over what could be years. When I feel a song approaching doneness, I focus on that one and knock it out. But then the track just kinda sits there until the rest of the album is done.

With Sevendys, we go into the studio, cut four complete tracks, and simply release them as they’re mixed. For example, “Enjoy It” was mixed the day before it was mastered, and released ten minutes after the master was approved. That’s exhilarating. I’ve got Eric Jarvis, who only started mixing my stuff last year, telling me how great it is to work with somebody who just gets stuff online and out so fast, and I’m cracking up because I really move glacially slowly. But Sevendys has managed to put out something in every month of 2011 so far, and I see no reason why that will stop.

Lots of italics in this post! I am emphasizing all kinds of shit, WHOOOOOOOO!

I’ve decided not to wait around for albums to happen anymore. There are mechanisms for collecting singles into albums and pressing albums into cool physical products, and I’ll still do that stuff, because I love to do it… but I see no reason to hoard tracks for moments so far in the future, they may as well never come. Let’s enjoy “She Loves You (NO NO NO)” today!

Sevendys LA session video | photos

Slowly decompressing from the LA trip. Jet lag wasn’t really an issue – I never caught up with the time difference because I didn’t really sleep while I was there (then again, I don’t really sleep anywhere). But my visit was packed with all-hours activity and I was pretty weary by the time I got back to NY. I still haven’t actually been home… I’ve spent the entire week in Brooklyn, recuperating at Crazee Joe’s. Looking forward to my Albany return tomorrow.

We got four really excellent-sounding tracks done, all live to tape in the studio. The band was set up Wrecking Crew-style in a rabbit warren of isolation panels; once we got a feel for the space, it became pretty easy to communicate during takes. The room (EastWest’s Studio Three) was small but full of character, and I think it definitely colored the music… everything has this syrupy smoothness to it, including the vocals.

Unlike the first Sevendys session, for which Sheridan and I’d had a week of rehearsal, this time the band came in completely cold. As a result, the live feel coalesced around the most prepared player – Chuck. He created this black hole of groove, just pulling everybody in. It was awesome! Sheridan went all Bernard Purdie on the shit, and Avi’s guitaring got super funky while retaining the jangly sweetness that is so characteristic of his rock playing. Definitely some alchemy going on. Here’s a sample, a video snippet from one take of “Congratulations”:

This batch of tunes was full of starts, stops, dropouts and tempo changes; Jerry played us through those on everything from Taos congas to an entire bag of egg shakers. He also served as a sort of field general, sensing weak points in the performance and pointing them out so we could shore things up. Meanwhile, engineer Ben and assistant Stuart kept things moving in the control room under the watchful eye of The Jarv, who was in turn working under the long-distance Yoda-like guidance of Dave McNair. The Celik brothers took over the control room (the whole facility, really – ask the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were recording in Studio Two) and sent good vibes through the glass, and David Dillon brought the sax for a song that was called “No, REALLY Listening” when we tracked it but will henceforth be known as “Please Don’t Eat Me, I Love You”. All these cool characters… I’m still trying to figure out what the point was of having me at this session!

On Wednesday night we did a Sevendys gig at local Long Beach haunt DiPiazza’s. Chuck had already flown back, but The Jarv sat in on bass (and even played the same bass Chuck used for the session). I was a nervous wreck – five months of playing on the UAlbany campus will do that to you – but Avi, Sheridan and The Jarv were so good, and the crowd so warm, I ended up with a nice live buzz. We closed with the Celik brothers on stage for this steamrolling cover of George Harrison’s “Wah Wah”:

When we weren’t making music, we Disneyed it up with my gracious hosts, Michael Doret and Laura Smith, and Jerry’s awesome son Diego. Late nights were reserved for burgers and donuts with Jax. Just an incredible trip!

While I get the LA tracks in shape for mixing, I’ve started making plans for the next Sevendys session. That will happen this spring at Dreamland in Woodstock, if Avi and Sheridan’s schedules allow. Chuck and Jerry have become part of the fabric of the band, and I hope they’ll both continue with us – I am hearing insane trap kit/Taos drum Sheridan/Jerry interplay on the next batch of tunes. Maybe the full-on five-piece Sevendys could do a few gigs, too.

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Once I’m back in Albany, at my Pro Tools rig, I’ll prep another batch of Green Plaid Recordings to share. These are just too much fun. I’ll also get back to work with Dom on the new Skyscape record; Jerry has already begun adding drums, and hopefully I can get this stuff done by the end of the year. 2011 is Skyscape’s 20th anniversary, after all.

Flying to Los Angeles first thing tomorrow morning for the next Sevendys session and some hanging with Avi and the gang. I’m really psyched. We have five songs that I believe are very strong, and it’s an even better band than last time: Sheridan, Avi, Chuck and I will be joined by Jerry Marotta on percussion!

We’re gonna track live to tape as an ensemble, just like we did in Houston. This time, we’ll be set up Wrecking Crew-style in EastWest’s Studio Three, birthplace of Pet Sounds and many Mamas & Papas hits. I’ve picked some material, mostly new stuff (just finished the last of the lyrics on Valentine’s Day), which I think is appropriate for the room, the band and the city, and arranged it with the history of the space in mind. I’m not trying to be Brian Wilson or John Phillips – I obviously could never – but of the five songs we’ll be recording, two apiece pay tribute to their respective groups. I’ve worked really hard on the vocal arrangements, and I hope they feel right.

The fifth song is a complete stylistic departure, though still very LA: a hair-metal tune called “Ride The Party Bus”. Yes, I am going to ask Chuck Rainey to pedal on roots for four minutes. Let me apologize to the bass gods right now…

I’ll try to post video, and maybe even some audio, as the session unfolds, and I expect to be tweeting about it as well. We have two days in the studio to make the magic… then we’re going to Disneyland! Oh, and we have a Sevendys gig on Wednesday night in Long Beach. See you there, West Coast friends?

Whoa, a little Descendents action in the title there!

One of the best things about making music is that it comes with pictures, and you get to choose what picture comes with your music. Not even the death of physical product has spoiled the symbiotic relationship between music and album cover. Awesome for me; album art is the place where my two passions intersect.

As much as I love designing for print and dimensional objects, I have to admit that the digital album cover presents specific challenges which are very satisfying to meet. In digital, you only get one small image to make your impression – there’s no inner sleeve, no booklet, not even a back cover. You’ve got to be perfectly on point. Clear, vivid imagery; metaphors have to be extra clever because they have to be extra simple.

In digital, as in print, color choices need to be just right. The color of album art can have an almost synaesthetic effect, causing the listener to associate that color with the music, and that absolutely does affect the listening experience. I still “hear” Faith No More’s Angel Dust as blue, and their King For A Day as red… prescient choices on the designer’s part, or simply my reaction to the packaging?

I love doing referential stuff, period stuff. With our “classic American music in classic American studios” approach, Sevendys has given me a chance to have fun with classic American musical design. Since each song is being treated as a single, I’ve had to make a corresponding “cover” for every one and I’m having a LOT of fun so far.

Here are some notes on the concepts and techniques behind these designs. Maybe one day I’ll do a cover-by-cover retrospective post on every item in my back catalog (assuming you missed the Art of Eschatone Records exhibition in Brooklyn a couple years ago), but for brevity(and sanity)’s sake I’ll keep this to the first four Sevendys illustrations.

“City Of My Dreams”
My friend and frequent collaborator Michael Doret recently designed an awesome typeface called Steinweiss Script. It’s based on the “Steinweiss scrawl”, the calligraphy developed in the 1940s by Alex Steinweiss, the Columbia Records art director who invented the album cover. Since this would be the first piece of Sevendys art, I figured why not take it from the top and do a tribute to Steinweiss?

“I Hate Love”
This song is technically the “double A-side” of “City Of My Dreams”, so I wanted to play in roughly the same era design-wise. In both pieces, the color palette is limited and all the elements are built out of repeated simple geometric shapes – “City Of My Dreams” is just a series of rectangles, and everything on the “I Hate Love” cover is made of circles. For a vintage look, I messed with both illustrations to make them look like they’d been printed slightly out of register.

Also, honestly… I can’t believe no one thought of the heart-shaped mushroom cloud before me. I’m still waiting for somebody to come forward and ruin my moment.

One welcome side-effect of starting so simple was that it helped me work my drafting chops back into shape. During my decade-plus of art direction, I hadn’t spent much time in the trenches doing any actual illustrating – conceptualizing and compositing are not the same thing as getting in there with your hands and scribbling. I’m still warming up, but after the first two covers I began to feel confident enough to forge ahead with the next round of Sevendys artwork – two pieces I might have otherwise farmed out.

“So So Close”
When I was in college, I was way into the work of Victor Moscoso. I loved psychedelic art in general, but to me, Moscoso’s stuff had something extra. Maybe it was his “vibrating color” – the way he would put opposing colors right next to each other with no borders – or his truly creative sense of layout. If you look back at old Skyscape flyers and demo covers, that’s me biting Moscoso’s rhymes hard. Not that I could even come close; his concepts are super high, and his techniques are his alone.

I had the chance to work with Moscoso on packaging for The Cutting Room Floor, and it was such a thrill for me. He still has it, and he doesn’t use computers to get it (though I learned that he does make pretty heavy use of Xerox machines). Moscoso was able to superimpose multiple images in a way that created a compelling illusion (look at the cover through a pair of old red-and-blue 3-D glasses, one eye at a time, to see what I mean) while still being beautiful at a glance.

The “So So Close” cover design is a tribute to Moscoso: the simple negative-space illusion created by lettering, the vibrating placement of borderless green and blue on a red background. By the way, you haven’t missed this track – the song’s not mixed yet. March, if not sooner!

“When I Step Off The Train”
This one’s a nod to all of the Big Five San Francisco poster artists – it’s got a little something from each one. The colors are the same as “So So Close” (plus black and the white of the paper) because the two pieces will be screenprinted onto one jacket when both songs are released on 7-inch. The vibrating color is your Moscoso connection; the deconstructed-train columns on the sides are, to me, reminiscent of the techno-psychedelia Stanley Mouse was doing well into the Eighties; the use of the Art Nouveau block lettering is a Wes Wilson thing; the Mucha-like columnar composition, including the Nouveau ornaments in the upper corners and outline of the hippie girl’s hair, is something all of the Five used, but none so faithfully as Alton Kelley.

Both this and “So So Close” were sketched on paper, then scanned and completed in Illustrator. Knowing that they’d eventually be printed, I felt comfortable giving both designs a bit more detail. Oh! The diamond checkerboard area at the bottom is not wasted space – it’s a spot for the band to sign and number when the singles are pressed. Just sayin.

By the way, here is an almost-finished mix of “When I Step Off The Train”, just in. The single won’t be out for a while, and the mix still needs one or two more tweaks, but why not stream it anyway?

Sevendys | “When I Step Off The Train” | in-progress mix
Jed Davis: keyboards, vocals
Avi Buffalo: guitars
Sheridan Riley: drums, tambourine
Chuck Rainey: bass
Recorded at SugarHill, Houston, TX
Mixed by Eric Jarvis

Sevendys’ next session: Presidents’ Day weekend in sunny LA. Chuck Rainey will be joining us once again, along with a few other surprise guests. The venue: EastWest Studio Three, where The Mamas & The Papas used to record… and the Beach Boys created Pet Sounds. We’re pretty psyched!

Here’s Collider performing “California Sun” live at CBGB, December 17, 1999, at an event called the Ramones Cyberpunk Blitz. [The Blitz was technically the launch party for Arturo Vega's officialramones.com, which was and will always be the only website endorsed by all of the Ramones while they were alive - both ramones.com and the late band members' individual sites were developed posthumously by their families, who then strongarmed Arty into giving up the officialramones domain and changing his site's name to RamonesWorld.]

The Cyberpunk Blitz featured 10 bands doing Ramones covers and a performance by Joey. All of the participants were asked to play under a Ramones-themed pseudonym; we changed our name to Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Stuff for the occasion. Because we were the only band with a keyboard player, we got to do some of the more esoteric tunes – “Howling At The Moon”, “We Want The Airwaves”, “All’s Quiet On The Eastern Front”, and this one.

That’s Chris De Rosa on drums, Bonnie Bowers on bass, Sean Gould on guitar, and yours truly. Video courtesy of Chris De Rosa.

I’ve been thinking about the term “Americana” as it relates to music. Technically, it refers to “roots music” like R&B and various folk and country styles. The contemporary distillation is “alt-country”. All that is what it is… those are culturally agreed-upon definitions and I’m not going to dispute them. But when I think of the word etymologically, as music that is American, it seems to me that we could expand the definition if we wanted to. Everything from jangly San Francisco pop to the Wall of Sound to bubblegum to Broadway to rap to jazz to the arena rock power ballad could be Americana.

Music was our culture’s most robust art form for almost half of the 20th Century. It was a vital driving force, the way the novel had been before it, and visual art before that, and poetry before that. But I think those days are finally over; music is now what all of those other things have been for most of my life: ephemeral entertainment. Music reacts to cultural change, and no longer directs it. Audiences are too fragmented for any one piece of music to have the impact of a “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, or an Appetite for Destruction, or any Beatles record.

You could argue that the chef or the comedian is the new rock star, but I think the art form that has replaced music is stupidity. It’s the only thing for which you can bank on every American tuning in. We love to gawk at other people’s moronic behavior in any medium. Stupidity inspires us to create and collaborate, and most importantly, to share… in YouTube form, stupidity brings us all together around the Facebook Wall the way a hit single once brought us together around a turntable or car stereo.

Anyway, if music is no longer America’s cultural lifeblood – and sure, you can argue that it still is, though I wouldn’t – then it should be safe to look back on its reign from here, just after the end, as something that can be considered in its entirety. What was American music?

I have my opinions, honed by years of friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) debate with Mike Keaney and the Hanslick Rebellion gang; informed by countless priceless firsthand conversations with New York punk rockers and San Franciscan concert poster artists; colored by my experiences in the music business of the 1990s and early 2000s, and by my status as a white male, a citizen of the East Coast, and a member of Generation X. My perspective may be useful, but it’s probably also sort of Cubist.

Say what you want about the “attention span issues” of Millennials, but the fact is that when they choose to engage with a subject, they go deep. They’ll use the Internet to its fullest potential, tracking down and consuming every morsel of information. I learned this when hanging with the Avi Buffalo crew, who pissed all over that stereotype about the intellectual indolence of Gen Y. Those guys are passionate about music and so they want to hear it all – every note ever recorded. And they want to know everything about how it was made. Avi and Sheridan are on the obsessive, beautiful quest of the true scholar, and they see music history in a context that’s as different from mine as mine is from that of someone who attended the first Television gig at CBGB.

Avi, Sheridan and I had been talking about doing some recording together… making it an adventure, trying out some of America’s legendary studios like Muscle Shoals, EastWest or Ardent. Studio recording is arguably a dying art, and in the past decade classic studios have been disappearing faster and faster. As we brainstormed potential destinations, I thought about how each studio represented a time, a region, and a sound. I began to categorize newly-written songs by appropriateness for a particular studio. A tune that might lend itself to lush sonic experimentation would get earmarked for Dreamland. Something basic, grooving and soulful, for Muscle Shoals.

We settled on SugarHill in Houston, Texas for our first recording safari. Originally known as Gold Star, it’s the oldest continually-operating studio in the United States. The air in that room has gotten shook up by all manner of hillbillies and bluesmen, by the Big Bopper and the 13th Floor Elevators. SugarHill isn’t synonymous with a sound, but the studio’s output represents a spectrum of styles that are all genuinely American.

All across the country, musicians of generations past – the very players who helped to develop their region’s signature sound – are still kicking around and quite vital. As a guitar/keyboard/drums trio, we lack a bassist, so that’s great for us… a local bass player can be our wild card, anchoring two Californians and a New Yorker to whatever city, style and era we happen to visit. As regards such, our trip to SugarHill went better than we could have imagined: the Texas bassist we drafted into Sevendys was Chuck Rainey.

We recorded basic tracks live in the studio, all in one room, instruments bleeding together. The sound was incredible. And here’s what it looked like:

The result: four songs, two of which are now available for listening and downloading. The other two are being pressed to 7″ vinyl, and we’re currently planning our next session. Working with Sheridan and Avi has me feeling so musically rejuvenated and excited… this is the most fun I’ve had playing in years! And there’s so much to consider, and to learn, about the history and fabric of American music as we embark upon this adventure. I almost feel like I’m getting to experience everything from multiple angles – through my own eyes and ears and simultaneously through the perspective of my other-generational partners. This is the first rung of a whole new ladder.

As I wrote a couple days ago, I’ve been helping to promote concerts on the UAlbany campus. There’s a room in the Campus Center that was supposed to be a coffeehouse; they even built a small stage in the corner, complete with lighting. But plans changed and the space now holds a Wendy’s instead. Every Tuesday night, we claim the room in the name of Rock and Roll (and University Auxiliary Services), bring in free coffee and tea, and turn it into the coffeehouse it was meant to be. We call it the Fake Coffeehouse.

I play every week, but I’m not the attraction. What draws students to the Fake Coffeehouse – and they come in increasingly large numbers – is their eagerness to support friends who play on that stage. I’ve brought in local and touring acts, too, and so far it’s clear that students prefer their own. The audience is big and generally polite no matter who’s on, but when UAlbany students perform, the place comes to life. It’s awesome. We started with two acts per show, but response has been so overwhelming that we added a third slot, plus an open jam at the end of the night.

This past week, we had James Blackshaw and his acoustic 12-string in for a set. James turned our modest space into a cathedral with gorgeous playing that was at once delicate and majestic. But it was the opener, a duo from Brooklyn called Mountains, who provided the Fake Coffeehouse’s finest moment so far: they built a crushing wave of ambient sound so intense, powerful and just plain loud that everyone in the room appeared windswept, as if we were all caught in the wake of a rocket engine. The crowd was shocked… you could feel minds expanding to accommodate new definitions of music. When was the last time you were truly shocked by a pure musical experience?

For some student musicians, the Fake Coffeehouse also serves as a classroom of sorts. Sure, a few people are content to get up and play shitty Jack Johnson covers; that’s their prerogative… I’m not going to turn anybody away just because I don’t care for what they do. There are a couple of regular participants, though, who seem genuinely passionate about creating, growing and improving. To that end, I’ve brought in a professor: Jerry Marotta. Jerry’s been supporting me on drums during my set, but then he generously stays late to jam with students at the end of the show. Last week, Jerry conducted two student guitarists through an increasingly complex series of starts and stops in an otherwise straightforward blues, and they just got better and better before our eyes. It’s a weekly masterclass with one of the best drummers on the planet.

Will every student who comes down engage with the music? Of course not… right now, the experience is largely social. But there are 17,000 students here, and even if a fraction of them develop a passion for playing and listening locally, we’ll have an awesome scene in this town. Something is definitely happening on campus – there’s music almost every night in the Wendy’s lounge now, including a WCDB open mic on Mondays and a Hillel-sponsored jam on Thursdays. I see all this imitation as proof that we’re on to something. Will the student musicians and fans ultimately take the action into town? I hope so.

I want every good musician in Albany – and there are a lot of them – to play to a packed house every night. I want everybody in Albany who appreciates music to be able to see a great show every night. Thousands of potential new participants show up in this city every year; they come to the region’s dozen-or-so colleges full of energy and fresh ideas; then they return every summer to the faraway places from which they came, eager to share the great things they discovered here. I will proceed as if anything is possible.

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I pissed away most of the past decade working on a stage musical called Rise And Shine. I actually hate musicals, but a friend convinced me that I should write one with him. When we completed our first draft, some heavies told us that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. Ten years later, we were told that it was almost there, and we were only about ten years from getting it produced. That’s when I decided I had wasted enough time on something I couldn’t really stand to begin with.

When I turned my full attention back to rock music, I discovered that in the decade since I had last put out a solo album, my entire audience had gone and decided that babies were preferable to… I dunno, name anything fun. Releasing The Cutting Room Floor felt great – so cathartic, after all I went through to get it done. But just as making that album was a learning experience, so was putting it out.

Now I want to do something new, completely new. Brand new songs; musicians I’ve never played with before; new audience, even, building from scratch. Maybe I’m just caught up in the college energy… dunno, don’t care. I’m going with it.

If I had to start a band from zero, and I could fantasy draft any musicians I know, my first-round choice would be Avi Buffalo’s Sheridan Riley on drums. And then I would pick Avi Buffalo’s Avi Buffalo on guitar. They inspire me and restore my faith in things… and they can play their asses off! Lucky for me, they’re both game. So in December, we’re going to SugarHill Studios in Houston, TX, to record our first batch of songs as Sevendys. Why Houston? Why Sevendys? A more important question would be: who’s playing bass?