As mentioned in a previous post, I won the chance to record with a six piece band at the fabulous Beaird Music Group in Nashville. That’s great, of course, really great. Not so great is my complete inability to figure out what song to record. That’s where you come in.

The playlist below consists of songs that I think might be good candidates for the Nashville treatment. They are all produced as well as I can with Band In A Box. Take a listen to them and list your top 3 in order. Remember, it’s not necessarily the best song, and it certainly doesn’t have to be the best production. It has to be one of the best songs, of course, or it’s not worth doing, but what really matters is which song would sound great when recorded by a band consisting of bass guitar, piano, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, slide guitar and drums. You don’t have to listen to all of them all the way through: 30 seconds to a minute might be enough to eliminate the weaker candidates. You might have to adjust the volume between tracks a little, as I have not got around to normalizing the volume between tracks.

Let me know your selection in the comments or, if you came here from the NSAI Charlotte Facebook page, you can post them there, if you prefer.

THANKS!

Yes, it’s that time of year again. This song first spread its own special brand of Christmas cheer last year, but, at almost 5 minutes long, there were rumblings from lovers of mistletoed melodies that it might be dishing out just a little too much of that cheer. So here it is again in a less fattening version, shorter and with a new intro.

“Amidst the bland crumpled tonal tinsel that assaults our eardrums in December, this spiritually uplifting work from the Mysterious Beings arrives like a blast of fresh, subtly pine-scented air. Against the backdrop of Christmas, the whole human condition is laid bare in all it’s heartbreak and glory. This is a song of love gone wrong, of the struggle for freedom, the assertion of identity and ultimately of triumph, as bitter-sweet as it is unexpected. Five Christmas stars!” – Mrs Jean Poole-Skimmings (no relation to our keyboard player, Gene Poole-Skimmings, and certainly not his mother)

At last, the wait is over. The Goat, The Gnu And The Tumbleweed, the new single from The Mysterious Beings is here. Click below to play on Spotify.

You’ll also find it in all the old familiar places – iTunes, Apple Music, etc.

…or more accurately, I am. If the rest of the band finds out, they’re not going to be pleased that I’m going without them. I feel like I can tell you in confidence here, since nobody else ever actually reads these posts.

I’ll be recording with a six piece band at the studio of Larry Beaird. Larry’s a pretty big cheese around those parts. In fact he recorded 2016’s number 2 best selling country album in his studio and has recently finished recording some tracks for Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. So working with me will only be a relatively small step up in the music world for him.

“How did this come about?” I hear you splutter into your beer. Well, while you wipe that up, I’ll explain. The official story is that I won this in a drawing during a workshop Larry did for the Charlotte chapter of the Nashville Songwriters Association. Between you and me, I’m pretty sure he arranged for all those wee bits of paper in the hat to have my name on them just so that he could add me to the list of megastars passing through his studio. Whatever the explanation, it leaves me with a quandary. Which of my grammy-worthy songs do I choose? Or is it still to be written?

Mr Sensible is actually one of our least sensible songs, which is saying quite a lot really. The song is dedicated to our Afghan drummer Kit Bashir, his unwitting paramour, Officer Prescott of Her Majesty’s Customs Service and everyone whose life is turned upside down by love.

If you want to know the story behind Kit’s amorous awakening, (and who knows? – maybe someone does), click here.

A new version of an old favorite. Well, of an old song, anyway.

A very early version of this modern rock classic was recorded in 2015 not long after our lead guitarist, Dee Sharpe, had lost his left hand to an infected llama bite during our ill-fated Andean tour and was in the process of perfecting his unique one handed style. This new version shows just how far his healing has come as he single handedly works his magic on his ax. Actually, he doesn’t much like that term for a guitar, as it serves as a painful reminder of the primitive medical techniques in certain parts of Peru.

Click on the wee arrow to play. You might need to allow a few moments for it to load.

Recently folks of a conservative persuasion, especially those with red hats sitting atop brains as tiny as their hearts, have been blaming a whole lot of stuff on the “liberal elite.” I’m not convinced that it exists, but, if it did, I’d really like to join. They seem like interesting chaps who would be fun to hang out with.

This song caused a bit of friction in the band. Our fiddler, Beau Strokes from right here in North Carolina, is very conservative and assumed I was too, since he had never observed me burning a flag or participating in satanic rituals with Hillary Clinton and George Soros. It took quite a lot of persuasion to get him to play on this. In fact, only the fact that nobody ever actually listens to our stuff convinced him that there would be no harm done.

Against Beau’s advice, we premiered this song at a social at the Falling Rock, North Carolina Elks Club in aid of the Association of Confederate Bikers. Our Swedish sound engineers Max and Minnie Mumsetting managed to make this recording just before the trouble started.

The lives of megastar musicians on the road can be tough, but we keep on going. The boys and I sat down one night in Lubbock Texas and got to wondering why. Maybe the answer is in this song we wrote that night, inspired by the tumbleweed that had blown in through the open door of our $20 a night motel. And maybe it’s not. Later, in the local saloon, we closed the show with it, performing it as our eighth encore before, like the goat, the gnu and the tumbleweed, moving on. Our Swedish chef and sound engineer, Max Mumsetting captured the performance on his phone and uploaded it here.

A tip of the hat to Messrs Flanders and Swann in the second verse.

Grab your headphones and click on the wee arrow above to listen.

A lot of people seemed to like this simple song dedicated to my first daughter, Niamh, when we recorded it a while ago, so, ahead of its upcoming release on Spotify and iTunes, we made a video. It’s mostly just the moon and clouds, but the images seemed appropriate for a song about love, the passing of time , mortality, memory – all the great themes that pass through your head when you lie with your child asleep on your chest and you can just feel her growing.

Put on your headphones, click on the full screen icon at the bottom right and, if you’re on your phone, turn it sideways. It might take a few moments to buffer and start playing, depending on your connection speed.  Let us know if you enjoy it in the comments.