Incidentally, you can buy both digital downloads and physical CDs from CD Baby, but due to the expense of manufacturing and shipping physical CDs they cost more than digital downloads and we make less money from them, so we encourage you to purchase the digital downloads from CD Baby. They are high quality 200kbps VBR mp3 files, no DRM, and you can get instant gratification If you would like a physical CD but don’t want to pay for shipping, just find either Brian or myself in person and we will happily sell them to you at $5 each.

Every song or album that you purchase from us directly funds our music… for the foreseeable future, all of our money from our music will be going into paying for studio time to record a full length album this winter break. We don’t have a label, so all of our money is coming out of our own pockets. So please buy some of our stuff and help fund more great independent music from Wrong Side of Dawn!

Once again, these are *rough* mixes, which means that they have not been polished much at all, these songs sound almost exactly the way they did when we recorded them. Before bands publish their music, they generally edit their songs to make them sound better, cutting out mistakes, putting effects on their instruments and voices, making sure the volume levels are all even, etc. We have not done that here, so these songs all sound worse than the finished product will, but I thought it would be best to “release early, release often” and make these songs available in their unfinished state now so that you can see what we’ve been up to all this time. Note that track 5 “Vulture” is not intended to be an instrumental, we just haven’t gotten around to recording the vocals for it yet.

At this point, we may not actually do final mixes of all of the songs that we recorded. Our current plan calls for doing final mixes of 5 of our favorite songs and officially releasing those as an EP. Then we want to go back into the recording studio with a new lineup and re-recording the songs we were less happy with, as well as some new songs that we’ve been writing. Stay tuned and hopefully we’ll have some more interesting news for you later this summer.

The first song we worked on was the same song I had been working on when I was last in the studio, a song that will be titled either “Out of Time” or “Running Out of Time.” As we finished up with it, Michael Nuzzo, the owner of the studio, made a passing comment about the fact that the song “has something to it,” which is big for me because it’s one of the few times in my long history as an amateur songwriter that anyone outside of my own band has ever suggested to me that one of my songs has any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

“Running Out of Time” original demo:
Running Out of Time, mp3
Running Out of Time, lyrics

I wrote the rhythm guitar parts and chorus melody to the song more than four years ago, but never got around to writing some decent lyrics until about one year ago. I could say that sort of thing about a lot of songs, because lyrics are so goddamn hard to write. Strangely, these lyrics might be inspired by the song’s own guitar solo.

Last June, I was trying to record demos of some of my songs. I had three verses written for “Running Out of Time.” I had a chorus with some “whoa whoa” nonsense singing that still remains part of the song. I had one guitar solo in the middle. The song was supposed to end with the chorus being repeated over and over as everything faded out.

After recording bass and acoustic guitar, I took out my electric guitar to record the short solo in the middle of the song. After I finished, I started improvising just for fun, playing over the part at the end where I had recorded the chorus chord progression over and over in order to facilitate the fade-out. After playing around a little bit, I decided that this sounded pretty good, so I pressed record. On my first take I ran out of space. I hadn’t played through the chord progression enough times to accommodate all of my improvised ideas. After a couple more takes, the solo was condensed down to fit the space I had unintentionally allotted myself, and the solo I recorded then is basically the same solo I play now.

As I listened back to what I played, I decided that the song would have to end with this guitar solo, rather than the vocal chorus that I had planned. I also started to have second thoughts about my lyrics. A song with a guitar solo this good would need better lyrics than this.

I closed my eyes and listened back over the solo. Strangely, a memory popped into my head, a memory of playing in my yard when I was four.

Yeah, I remember when I was four. I guess some people don’t remember that far back, but I remember being two. My oldest memory is of my mother trying to explain to me what a birthday was, because the next day was going to be my third birthday. Since I didn’t know how to count, I don’t think I actually realized that I was two. I just knew that I was about to be three.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the guitar solo. I figured that something was nostalgic and backward-looking about the sound of the guitar. From that jumping-off point, I fashioned some lyrics that worked sort of in reverse chronological order. The first verse starts in the present, watching the sun rise (on the wrong side of dawn, in fact). The second verse recalls an old friend. The last verse looks back to childhood, when you did stuff just because it was there to be done. Then the last line says there’s no more time for that, but hey…. GUITAR SOLO!!!!!!!

On another subject, recording the “Out of Time” vocals in the studio provided me with an early moment of panic, when it initially turned out that I couldn’t hit the lower harmony on the intro of the song. Since I’d recorded the demo, my voice had apparently gotten… higher?!?!?!? Let’s go back and figure this out…

My senior year at Swat, I joined the chorus because I needed one year of participation in a performance ensemble to graduate with my music minor. Not confident that I could work my violin chops back up in time to join the orchestra, I approached John Alston about the possibility of joining the chorus. He asked me when was the last time I’d sung classical music. I said, “Eighth grade.” John seemed pretty concerned about my ability to keep up with his chorus. Good thing I didn’t tell him the truth: “Never, John. I barely listen to any classical music. But sing it? Never.”

I remember the first day that I showed up for chorus rehearsal. Some of my friends were in the chorus, and as I walked towards the men’s side of the room, clear confusion on my face as I tried to find a seat, they asked me, “Are you a bass or a tenor?” I didn’t know. I thought I could figure out a way to sing whatever I had to. The bass section was about three times the size of the tenor section, and the tenors seemed pretty desperate for some more support, so I sat down next to my friend Misha in the tenor section. This didn’t last. A shocked John Alston spotted me and had me move into the already overcrowded bass section. “What are you doing over there? You’re a baritone.” John had yet to actually hear me sing. It wasn’t until after that rehearsal that I would sing and barely pass my overdue audition. John had apparently gleaned my range just from talking to me.

He seemed to be right about me not being a tenor. I definitely got less comfortable as the notes got above middle C. Some of the lowest notes were also a problem too at first, but I was eventually pretty comfortable getting down to an E below the bass staff.

Fast forward to this year in Nuzzo’s studio: I’m trying to record the two-part harmony from the “Out of Time” intro. The lower half of the harmony goes down to a G, the one on the bottom line of the bass staff. Back in June when I made the demo? Piece of cake. Clearly within my range. Now, I’m doing take after take and I can’t quite get there. I’m getting a little panicked, since the clock is ticking by on my studio time, and Nelson and I have already spent more money on this than we planned.

Ever since graduation from Swarthmore, I do most of my singing while driving, singing along to the songs on my iPod. Most rock singers sing in the tenor range. Tough for me at first, but I got used to it. I thought my range was expanding. Apparently it wasn’t; it was just shifting. I never realized your voice could actually get HIGHER as you got older.

Nuzzo, the owner/producer/engineer/everything of the studio, is a school choir director. I expressed my frustrations at not being able to reach notes that were so easy less than a year ago. Not too long after John Alston was so surprised to see me sit down next to Misha in the tenor section, it was Nuzzo’s turn to be shocked. “You’re not a bass,” he said. “If you were in my choir I’d use you as a tenor.”

David Hume says we have no way of knowing that the future will be anything like the past, so for all I know I may wake up tomorrow making sounds that only dogs can hear. But this still seemed pretty weird to me. Anyways, Nuzzo managed to coach me through my own goddamn music until I got the G, and “(Running) Out of Time” is now recorded and ready to be mixed.

P.S. So when guys are stretching to sing higher, they joke around by pretending to squeeze their testicles. What is the equivalent when you’re trying to sing lower? Do you hold your hands down by your knees, palms up, like Tanaka talking to Pedro Cerrano (a.k.a. President Palmer/the “you’re in good hands with All State” dude/Dennis Haysbert) in Major League II? “You have no… you have no… …. MARBLES!! You have no marbles!”

“Marbles? Huevos?”

[Note: After I originally wrote this, Nelson corrected me to say that "Where Is Bobby" is actually not at all boring to listen to, just painfully boring to record.]

Here’s my demo:
Where is Bobby McGee? mp3
Where is Bobby McGee? lyrics

The lyrics don’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense if you’ve never heard “Me and Bobby McGee,” originally by Kris Kristofferson (you can find lyrics here) and made famous by Janis Joplin. The song was originally about a girl named “Bobby.” Janis Joplin switched the genders of the characters, and it’s her version that I’m working with in my take on Bobby McGee. Most people think of Bobby as a boy, and that version works better for me anyway.

The inspiration for “Where Is Bobby McGee?” can be traced back to Prof. Rick Schuldenfrei of Swarthmore’s philosophy department. When I first went away to school, my dad had only one request: “Just don’t major in philosophy.” I think this is because my dad wanted me to get a job when I graduated. Dad didn’t realize that Brian Rose could have majored in anything at any college, and in no case would he have graduated with a job waiting for him. So I never really considered majoring in philosophy, but I did take a couple of classes with Schuldenfrei. Contrary to my dad’s ideas about the subject, Schuldenfrei doesn’t seem to think that philosophy is about thinking deep thoughts while you beg for change on the street. Or while you sit in your ivory tower, whichever stereotype you prefer. The man seems to think that the study of philosophy can change lives and predict the future. While I give the guy credit for that, I have to say that what I really like is his tendency to make fun of people and to pound his fist on his desk when he gets frustrated

In Schuldenfrei’s class we read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Mill is a big fan of freedom, apparently. Sounds like a good guy then, eh? Surprisingly enough, Schuldenfrei is not a big fan of Mill. In “On Liberty,” Mill explains all about how freedom of speech and freedom of action will lead to an enlightened society, where individuality will lead people to develop all their abilities to the fullest: “It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox.”

Holy shit, do I have to unpack that entire goddamn sentence? Screw that. That’s an essay on its own. Let’s just say Pericles was a smart guy and leave it at that. And Mill says more freedom = more Periclesesses.

Schuldenfrei disagreed with Mill, and he let the class know. According to Schuldenfrei, empirical evidence tells us that freedom often leads to a society filled with people who don’t want to be Pericles. They just want to feel good. Schuldenfrei pounded his fist on the desk while trying to remember a song that he couldn’t quite put his finger on… “Bobby McGee,” he said. “I don’t think this sort of freedom turns people into Pericles. It turns them into Bobby McGee. Feelin’ good is good enough for me.”

While turning this idea over in my head during class, I came across the phrase “Bobby McGee can have his freedom,” (the original working title of the song) and tucked it away in the back of my mind because I thought it sounded cool. That night I took out my acoustic guitar and started playing a riff I’d written in about 5 minutes the day before. With the original “Me and Bobby McGee” lyrics sitting in front of me on the computer, I wrote my lyrics, not including the fourth verse, in about 15 minutes. A combined 20 minutes to write the song. Quickest song I ever wrote. (Usually writing a song takes several hours spread out over the course of weeks, or in some cases, spread out over a few years). I included a ton of references back to Janis’s Bobby McGee, right down to the “la la” part at the end. The song is based off of one of Schuldenfrei’s signature themes: Americans love to talk about our rights and freedoms, but what happens when freedom becomes the biggest priority in your life?

Rather than say more, I’ll just let the song speak for itself, outside of a couple of clarifications. In my first draft, the song was all about a single character, Bobby McGee. But then I realized that I’d created a sort of paradox in chronology. The speaker in the first verse seems to be at least as old, probably older than the girl, and by implication older than Bobby. In the second verse of my first draft, Bobby is a memory from childhood, a memory of an older guy. I didn’t know if Bobby should be older or younger than the speaker, whether the song should take place in 2007 or 1967… so I got Bobby out of the song all together in my final draft. He’s just a concept and not a character. The guy in the second verse is now the same age as the speaker. He’s not the ex-boyfriend from the first verse. And neither of them are THE Bobby McGee, though they may be analogous to him. I also started thinking the song sounded a little preachy, especially coming from a guy who might not always follow his own advice. So I added the fourth verse to say, “I’d like to avoid being Bobby McGee, but what the hell, I can’t say.” So four decades after the story was born, I guess I’d like to know… where is Bobby McGee these days?

First comes the “rough mix”, where we select which of the takes of each track on each song that we have recorded will be used for the final product. This is not as straightforward as it sounds: sometimes we will take the best part of each take and cut and paste them together to form one impossibly good take. The idea is to make sure that you record each section correctly at least once, rather than trying to get the entire song perfect in one take. This method doesn’t work very well if you don’t have the same rhythm track under each take, which is why ideally you want to lay down the rhythm tracks first (drums, bass etc.) and then record everything else later. Naturally, the more times you play the song through to add new instruments, the more studio time you use and the more money you burn. You can also lose some “feeling” when the entire band isn’t recording in the studio together. It’s hard walking the line between recording each instrument separately to approach perfection, and recording everything at once to try to save money and add “soul”. I think we struck a decent compromise with this album, but only time will tell.

There was also the issue of having too many takes of each track, making it difficult to decide which takes to keep and which to throw away. Brian solved this problem for his guitar solos on this album by wiping and re-recording each guitar solo until he got it exactly the way he wanted it, leaving us with only one take for each solo by the time we got to mixing. That saves us a lot of time when we go to mix, but he may have burned some extra time in recording using that method. For my vocals and Karen’s backup vocals, we laid down a handful of takes and moved on even if no single take was satisfactory, saving time in recording but burning more time in mixing. Ultimately, you have to decide which method is easiest / most efficient for you, it’s not something you can generalize about. (Of course, if you have oodles of money and time, it doesn’t matter which is more efficient, but we’re not at that level.)

Next we’ll move deeper into mixing, trying to tweak each track and use various effects to get each song to sound precisely the way we want it to, and editing out slight imperfections. The trick with this stage is not to be absurdly perfectionist, setting time limits and knowing when to walk away from a song that is “good enough”, otherwise the album will never get done. We’ll do our best

After that, if we think it’s worth cleaning up the album to top-40 radio quality, we’ll have to get someone to master the album, polishing our sound to a shiny finish. We’ll see how the album is sounding by then, and how much that process will cost…

I (Nelson) have relocated to southern California for the rest of the semester, so progress on the album will be slow until I return in May, but we’ll start seriously mixing in May, and we hope to release the album to you wonderful people sometime this summer.

Brian Rose: lead guitar, vocals
Nelson Pavlosky: rhythm guitar, vocals
Andrew Angelin: bass guitar
Greg Albright: drums
Steven Stratvert: piano/keyboards
Karen Rustad: backing vocals

We expect to have a finished album, recorded and mixed, by the end of January. Then the next step will be getting album artwork, printing and packaging copies of the thing, and then figuring out ways to sell it. Stay tuned!

If you want to hear the SSSG in action, check out the original jam that Nelson recorded, and then the remix that Karen made called Regret (lyrics), which will probably end up on the official album in some form, perhaps after some re-writing and re-recording.

This rant about the sad decline of the guitar solo in modern rock was originally posted by Brian on his Facebook. Since he’s our lead guitarist, I thought you might be interested It is intended to be the first in a series, so if you like it, you can hope for more!

If you asked me four years ago about the state of popular music, I would have told you that rock had died sometime in the mid ’70s, that with a few exceptions, chief among them U2, no one had recorded anything worthwhile since then, and I had no reason to listen to the radio because all new music is crap and I’d be better off spending my time figuring out what classic rock record I should buy or download next. Nu metal, hip hop, emo, pop punk, teen pop, it was all crap to me (some of that is still crap… others not so much).

The other day I was listening to the Fray’s “Over My Head.” I’m sure most people are pretty tired of this song by now, but, since I still don’t ever listen to the radio, the song still seems fairly new to me. Now, I don’t think the Fray is anything special, in fact, they’re probably primed to flame out after one album. And the song is an excellent pop song… no more and no less. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to hear on the radio today. But it’s also the kind of thing you could never hear 35 or even 5 years ago. Despite my insistence that rock music is degenerating, I have to admit that it has evolved.

I’m not really looking to give a complete lesson in rock history, but simply to trace a few elements of rock music that I, personally, like. This is purely my opinion, and I’m working with a strong confirmation-bias. I was going to write a note about this, but I think it’s going to be too much; I’ll have to write two notes. I know you don’t want to read two notes. In fact, there’s probably no one who even made it this far in this note, once they realized the whole thing was more than two paragraphs. That’s OK, because this isn’t for you. It’s for me. Seriously, I’m going to come back and read this tomorrow. And when I do, I’ll say to myself, “Self, this is some damn good shit.” But if you like reading other people’s opinions on this stuff, as I do, you can go ahead and read.

The good stuff will come later, but I’ll use this first note to get one thing off of my chest, the one thing that really sucks about rock, the one area where musicians have been dropping the ball for thirty years. I’m talking about the downfall of the emotive, virtuoso guitar solo.

Both adjectives are important.

Emotive. A lot of people point to B.B. King as the blues guitarist with the biggest influence on rock, and I assume he is the root of a lot of great emotive rock playing. King never steamrolls through a guitar solo with a lot of fast runs of notes. The secret of a B.B. King solo lies in the nuances of rhythm and dynamics, and of course, those bent notes making a sound that no one else can really reproduce. I’ve heard his style described as “pleading,” and I think that sounds about right.

Virtuoso. OK, so, B.B. King in a literal sense is a virtuoso, a master, but I want to use “virtuoso” to mean something a little more specific. Virtuoso guitar playing, at least the way I use the term, means guitar playing of such a high degree of technical skill that few other people could present even a token reproduction of it. A beginning guitarist could at least finger through the notes of a B.B. King solo. It might not sound any good, but it could be done. Not the case for Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.” “Eruption” is virtuoso, and can be played only by a talented and experienced musician. The virtuoso guitar element in rock came from fast blues playing, and also some white hillbilly stuff. It was pretty much all funneled into the rock tradition through Chuck Berry. Berry’s guitar work is that fast, energetic, party-time sound of rock guitar. There isn’t a single decent rock guitarist that doesn’t owe a debt to Chuck Berry.

Forget the really old dudes for a second and jump ahead to the golden age of what we call “classic rock,” the period from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s. Here’s a list of names to consider: Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, Duane Allman, David Gilmore, Jeff Beck, Brian May, Neil Young, Richie Blackmore. All of them first rose to fame somewhere in the 1966-1969 range. There are other great guitarists that appeared around this time; these are just the absolute best ones I could think of during a skim through my iTunes library. Could you put together a list like this for any other 4-year period since then? Actually, if you combine all the years from 1970 to the present, could you come up with 10 new guitarists that could match the 10 listed above? No you can’t. OK, fine. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Mark Knopfler, Kirk Hammett, Randy Rhodes, Billy Gibbons, Tom Morello, Eddie Van Halen, Slash, and maybe throw in a couple from the Satriani/Vai/Johnson crowd. I still think my first list rocks harder. And remember, we’re looking at 4 years vs. 37 years.

So what happened? My story goes like this: reaching its peak in the early 1970s, rock guitar pretty much self-destructed, with the virtuoso side killing the emotive side.

A lot of the fault lies, inadvertently, with some of the ’60s players I named above. The popularity of guitarists like Hendrix, Clapton and Page created this sort of cult of the “guitar god.” These guys never wanted to be gods, and were often pretty confused and stressed by the status they attained. When they learned guitar, there was no such thing as a guitar god. Their idols were B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry… these were blues men. Pop-culture god status for a blues guitarist is really against the philosophy of blues, which requires a kind of sympathy between the performer and the listener. To divide a blues show into guitar hero/guitar worshipers would defeat the purpose. The blues man is not supposed to be above his audience. In addition, these were all blacks performing in the pre-civil rights era. Prejudice alone was enough to bar them from creating the kind of mainstream sensation that their followers would achieve.

And so the guitar god was created in the late 1960s, and every up-and-coming guitarist since then has had a “me next” kind of attitude toward the whole thing. People seem to believe that if they can play as loud and as fast as Jimi Hendrix, that means they are Jimi Hendrix. But guitarists without the blues background just haven’t played as compellingly as their predecessors.

And so the ’70s passed without many new guitarists of note. There were some great solos recorded around that time: “Freebird,” “Hotel California,” “Aqualung.” But are the names “Don Felder” and “Martin Barre” really synonymous with guitar greatness? Most of the well-known solos of the ’70s were recorded by ’60s guitarists like the ones I’ve already named. (”Stairway to Heaven,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Layla,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” etc.). The old guard pretty much held steady at the top of the pecking order.

You do start to see something new with Deep Purple’s 1972 album “Machine Head.” Take a listen to Richie Blackmore’s guitar solo in “Highway Star.” Blackmore and Deep Purple had been around since 1968, but this is where heavy metal guitar really started to take a turn. Blackmore was playing really fast now. Faster than god… if god = Hendrix or Clapton. Blackmore was a complete guitarist, not just a speed player. You probably already know this from the “Smoke on the Water” solo. The final triumph of speed over emotion, would not occur until…

1978. This is the year that the first Van Halen album came out. “Eruption” is one and a half minutes of work that guitarists have been trying to match ever since. Once upon a time, every kid who picked up a guitar wanted to be Jimi Hendrix. Since 1978, everybody’s wanted to be Eddie Van Halen. Problem is, Eddie isn’t a complete player. The guy can play faster than anyone who came before him, but he’s afraid to play slow! Actually, I’m not being completely fair. The solo from 1996’s “Humans Being” has a lot of gut and very little ego, and it might be my favorite Van Halen solo. But the damage was already done. The new generation of guitarists had already gotten the idea that all you gotta do is play the fastest lines in town and you’re the man. At this point, metal guitar severed its last links to B.B. King and company.

After Van Halen, you get a sea of wannabe hair-metal guitarists like Richie Sambora. There are a few good ones in there, particularly Slash and Kirk Hammet, but most of your ’80s guitar work is trash. Lots and lots of fast notes, and every note is worthless. And the whole time, the the pretty much solo-less punk scene rolls along until pretty much winning the battle when Nirvana mercifully killed hair metal in the ’90s. And that was pretty much the end of guitar solos on the radio.

It was bound to happen; speed guitar can’t survive in the mainstream. It wasn’t the guitar solo pyrotechnics that drew the public to Van Halen in the first place, but rather Eddie’s catchy rhythm guitar parts and the showmanship of David Lee Roth. I’m not sure that the speed playing really pulled that many people to Van Halen. But it definitely attracted the young musicians, and they’re the ones who would direct rock guitar in the future.

Guitar fans have since satisfied their need for speed with cult heroes like Joe Satriani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and Dream Theater. (Dream Theater reminds me that I forgot about the influence of Rush on speeding up rock in the 70s… I can’t squeeze in everything.) Guitarists love Dream Theater because they can play insanely fast songs with constantly changing time signatures of 13/8 and other such ridiculousness. And while I respect that kind of talent, I regret the fact that the new school of guitar is doomed to never hit the mainstream. They will always be musicians’ bands and musicians’ bands only. The general public doesn’t appreciate 13/8 time. What they do appreciate is emotion. And sometimes emotion is the thing that gets sacrificed when playing 64th notes.

We’ve reached the point where guitarists have forgotten that music is not a penis-measuring contest, but a way of expression. The idea is to make your listeners feel emotion, not to show them how many notes you can play in 10 seconds. With the exception of Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, who always remembers to include some soulful wailing, every speed player seems to fall into the faster-is-better rut from time to time. But sometimes less is more.

Example: If you listen to no other songs that I mention in this note, you still have to go download Santana’s “Europa.” And not the original version, you need the live version from the “Moonflower” album. From 3:34 to 3:52 is one of the best 18 seconds of guitar solo you will ever hear—and it’s all one note. He holds one note for 18 seconds, and the tension that breaks when he releases the bend is so powerful that it carries its momentum straight through the final 2 minutes of the song. There are some fast licks that follow. But it’s all set up by that one note.

Now, I enjoy a John Petrucci (Dream Theater) solo as much as the next guy. And the other day I was driving with my iPod on random shuffle, and Joe Satriani’s “Surfing With the Alien” came on, and I had to resist the urge to speed up to 2,000,000 mph. But if speed and show-off technique is the future of guitar, it really makes me sad to see what’s going extinct: guys like Carlos Santana, David Gilmore or Stevie Ray Vaughn, guys who can play fast, but under whose fingers one note can be worth 1,000. Plus, solo guitar has abandoned the mainstream. The pop kids will go off and play their punky power chords. The hardcore technique musicians will run off to their math-rock. And never shall the two sides meet. Nor shall either of them play anything remotely bluesy.

There are some guys who are just completely off the map, like Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, and every once in a while something unexplainably awesome turns up, like Mike McCready’s “Alive” solo from Pearl Jam’s first album. But generally, solo guitar is dying. It’s becoming music for musicians only, and I personally think that sucks.

Anyway, that’s what I don’t like about the path of rock music. Now I’ll start working on the good part for installment #2. Coming god-only-knows-when.

If you hate Flash, you can try downloading the Quicktime file instead.

I played Flight / Crossing the Bar, Contained, and Break Free… I’ll have to see what other songs I can polish for public consumption. This was my first public performance in a while, so I was a little nervous! I also didn’t retune my guitar properly for Break Free, I’ll just use an electronic tuner in the future to make sure I get it right the first time around from now on. I hope to play more open mikes in the near future so that I can get used to playing live again, ideally together with more WSoD members

Speaking of the wrong side of dawn, you might want to check out the latest and greatest version of Running Out of Time (version 3 for those who are keeping track), and its updated lyrics:

Light appears at the edge of the sky
It reveals the problem for me
It’s just what somebody looking toward his day should see.
I see it now, from the other side; I’m about to go to sleep.
Got nothing done today but I’m thinking maybe sometime next week…