Upcoming Music for 2011

So as I mentioned in my last post, I have some new things happening musically this year. The first is a sideman gig playing lead guitar in the band Citay.



Citay is the brainchild of my friend Ezra Feinberg. Ezra started Citay as a solo recording project, but he honed the sound and got things popping with a live band and a legit label (Dead Oceans) after moving to San Francisco. While still using Citay as primarily a solo vehicle that is supplemented with musicians for shows, Ezra has now returned home and is in the process of putting together an East Coast version of the band. I'm very psyched to be part of that.

The music is a really fun and genuine homage/celebration of classic duel lead guitar shredding, Italo prog pastoral acoustic adornment, psychedelic space jams and 60's folk via 70's Laurel Canyon pop. My parts are primarily all single line guitar leads, so learning the music has gotten me back into some serious practice. I had plateaued technically a couple years ago, but now my fingers are on the brink of new shred-itude. Ezra's hoping Citay will start gigging in May, so I will keep folks posted on that here and on Facebook.

In addition to Citay, I'm also in the middle of a very creative and productive songwriting mode with my own music. This actually started over the summer, while I was in Taiwan with my family. The language barrier and cultural divide drove me into a deep funk, which then became literal funk. I combed the internet for any and all Prince I could find: albums, unreleased tracks, live shows, etc.




This became the basis for my current batch of songs. Other influential listening that I've done since the summer includes Twin Shadow, Tears for Fears and Bowie's discography from Station to Station to Scary Monsters (essentially the avant-garde cocaine/drinking years in LA, Berlin, and NYC). So all of that has been reflected in this new material, which I think has much more aesthetic and stylistic focus than anything I've done in years. Here are rough mixes of a couple of tunes...

Body

Sheena


I'll keep sharing songs as they come together and will also try to post some vids/pics that document the songwriting/home recording process as it unfolds.

Enjoy!