I'm happy to report that my first single officially available for streaming, "Gaslight" was released on September 22nd. This song came together in a bit of a whirlwind. My good friend and partner in crime in my cover band The Upside, Rick Mudd asked me if he could lay down some drum tracks at my home recording studio, Distilled Sounds. I had been listening to a lot of early 90's punk like Social D, Face to Face, and Bad Religion. I've always like the speed and aggression those bands had to their songs and even though the arrangements are fairly simple, they are catchy and have meaning to them. My sister has been battling brain cancer going on two years now and it's really taken a toll on her mentally and physically in the past few months. This created the perfect storm for a songwriting session and I quickly put together some scratch tracks so that Rick could record drums for me while he was here to work on his material. The arrangement came together quickly and so did all of the special sauce in the form of guitar leads and vocal hooks. Rick got the drums nailed in two takes. Many of the scratch tracks sounded so good that I kept them in the final version. I only overdubbed rhythm guitar tracks, bass guitar, and some backing vocals; I even kept 90% of the original scratch lead vocal. This song means a lot to me. If you've ever dealt with a loved one or close friend going through this type of illness and pain it might mean a lot to you too. I hope it does. It's helped me kind of cope with some feelings I have about not being there for her enough when I know she really needs me. The song was mixed and mastered in just a few weeks; a big thanks to my friend Steve Snider, who let me fit this in the middle of trying to finish songs for his upcoming releases I've been working on for a few months. I'm not trying to make money off of this, I just want it to be heard and hope that my words and music can help someone else out during a hard time. That being said, all purchases made through my Bandcamp page will 100% be donated to The National Brain Tumor Society. I also did a quick acoustic version for promoting the single which you can watch in the YouTube video below.
