Listen to Entropy Introducing "Entropy" on stage at the Jalopy Theater with my band, M Shanghai, I once asked the audience, "Can I see a show of hands? How many homeowners do we have in the crowd?" Crickets. Exactly no one raised their hand. Apparently, this was not the right question to ask a bunch of young-ish Brooklynites in 2007 just before the housing bubble burst. Hey, sometimes you shoot and miss. I was just trying to find a way to connect this concept song to somethin

Once I heard the clawhammer banjo and fiddle, rock music lost some of its luster.

I am the youngest of my parents' eleven children. No, that's not a typo. Eleven. My parents, Jack and Clare, were both dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Irish Americans from Jersey City who grew up during the Depression and WWII. They married right out of college in the early fifties, and within a few years they moved to the "Irish Riviera,” also known as the Jersey Shore.

Listen to "Don't Let Me Sleep" When I quit drinking in my early thirties, I was very fortunate to have the support of my family and friends. It made all the difference, really. I was also lucky to have a guitar to lean on, something from my childhood that absorbed me and provided me with an outlet. I was still commuting by train from the Jersey Shore to New York City then, working at the mastering studio in the tape library, and living at my parents' condo a short walk from t

Listen to "Better Off" Most bluegrass songs don't have bridges. But since I don't consider myself an exclusively bluegrass songwriter, I don't feel bound by this convention. A bridge can make or break a song. This is especially true for he "middle eight", or B part in the 32-bar (A-A-B-A) American popular standard form. Two examples of memorable bridges from Tin Pan Alley, one with a descending and one ascending melody, are "Dinah" (1925) and "Honeysuckle Rose" (1929). If you

Listen to Spacefood I had been playing the basic guitar part to what would ultimately become the song, “Spacefood,” for about twenty years before the lyrics snapped into place. The original words that matched the melody were “Norman and Nancy,” as in Norman and Nancy Blake, the GRAMMY-nominated “neo-traditionalist Americana folk and roots music duo” (per Wikipedia). Norman and Nancy had a big influence on me. I saw them in person a handful of times in the early ‘90s at festiv

Listen to Same Old Moon Same Old Moon: Reflections On Songwriting As with other songs I've written, the music to "Same Old Moon" came well before the lyrics. I had the basic guitar part for the intro and the verses for a few months or maybe years before the chorus appeared. I've learned to be patient about it. Some songs just need time to reveal themselves. The right conditions matter, too. One night, in my soon-to-be wife's apartment, I was staring out of the floor-to-ceilin