While writing the liner notes for The Sound Field's first CD, The Bucket
List, I had a glorious light bulb moment: internet bandwidth is limitless.
That particular cartoon moment resulted in as complete a compilation of
information as I could have hoped for in my maddest moments. I literally
got down, got dirty, got naked and rolled around in the language and the
story behind each song - not just how and why and when they were written
and who they were written about, but the way each song had come together
in the studio, with a list of fabulous guest players.
I'm about to do it again, with This Moment Of The Storm. And I'm going so
deep on this second one, the first set will look like book jacket blurbs.
The liner notes are about the stories, that we, as musicians and singers and
writers, are in service to. As a storyteller, as the author of ten of the twelve
songs, this is what I owe these songs, these stories, these moments of the
storm in which we've been locked since the theft of the vote in 2016, and
since the first reports of COVID-19 made their way into global awareness.
Settle in. Grab a beverage. This gets wordy because it has to.
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I bought my first 45 single in the mid-1960s. I believe it was The Rolling Stones, "Satisfaction",
but it might have been the Four Tops or The Loving Spoonful - memory is tricky that way. When I
began buying LPs a year or so later, I became addicted to liner notes. Then came the advent of smaller
packaging as a trade-off for longer playing time, and one of the casualties of that was the ability to
read the history of the players, who guested, in-depth things about the songs. Poof, gone.
Something bright and beautiful went out of buying music when liner notes went. Now, with the advent
of the website open to all, I decided to take a long deep breath and just go for it.
Before I get started on what will be an epic set of liner notes, some background on The Sound Field. |