The songs on this album were all done late at night with the same group of musicians, occasionally adding some overdubs we couldn't play together. We always took the version of each that felt best. We sometimes had to take a poll because different people liked different things about different takes. I thought I would share the rough mixes of a few of the tracks that didn't make it on to the album 'Hearsay'.

The biggest difference, the song "Bluebird", I completely re-wrote after I could not get clearance from the Charles Bukowski estate. The poem that inspired me to write that song is one of my favorites and the artist who did the album art, I actually found her as she had done an illustrated video of the song for an art project and I stumbled across it. She had never done album art, but did some new pieces for the album after I sent her some of the songs to get a feel for the record. I did not hear back from the Bukowski estate for years and when I did it was a flat "no".

The band loved that track, I did too, but in the end we also felt it was the outlier of the album. It didn't quite fit musically with the others anyway. We kinda went to outer space on that one track. Years later, I took the melody I wrote for this song and took the lyrics of another song I had written years ago that never made it onto an album and came up with "Nightbirds" and released that as a single.

Making this album is a wonderful memory, so thought I would share a bit more of it to my subscribers.

~SS