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how the magic happens

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Sitting in my sonic bubble. Headphones on, bass plugged in, staring at a sheet of glass – sucked into the vortex of 21st century recording software’s infinite possibilities (Logic, if you’re curious, and the irony of such a name for something that helps birth so many imaginings is not lost on me).

I pour one piece, a three-minute snippet of my analog soul, into this magic box, one take at a time. Notes and melodies and chords alchemized into ones and zeros.

screenshot of Logic

I used to resist this – longing for the “good ol’ days” of 2-inch tape and the legends of Abbey Road, but I now embrace my new electric overlord that lets me massage, prod and nudge these rainbow-colored sound waves until they more closely resemble this auditory loop that constantly runs through my head and won’t let me sleep.

And it’s overwhelming. I’m closer to the ‘rank beginner’ end of the spectrum than I wish when it comes to recording demos – bringing them to proto-life before I share them with the other wizards who will complete the metamorphosis.

So I have a process, a method that I’m sticking to for now. Don’t know if it’s the right one yet, but it’s something to follow so I Have Something To Do when I sit down:

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folk fest recap

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This is way overdue but here’s some video and pictures from the 2016 Tucson Folk Festival. For those who don’t know, the Folk Fest – as it’s usually called around here – brings folkies from all over the region. I think over two hundred acts perform over three days! I’ve been wanting to be a part of it for a while and this year it finally happened. Jamie, Mike and Brian played wonderful arrangements to these tunes – some that I’ve been playing around for many years, some are very new and two are either written by or cowritten with my dad, Tom Williams!

This video is a song that I co-wrote with Daddy when he sent me a beautiful stream-of-consciousness email about friendship and roads taken and untaken through the years – called “Across Time”

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Valley of the Moon

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There’s a funky old children’s attraction in Tucson that was started by a nice man in the 40’s as an enchanted place for kids. He made a magic snake out of oatmeal canisters and was re-using materials way before it was trendy. I was fascinated by the story and hence this song…

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ode to red room

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A few years back, when Jamie and I realized that Los Angeles wasn’t going to be our forever home (housing prices and earthquakes being two of the prime reasons) and we were casting about for new potential headquarters, we visited our friends Mike and Carrie in Tucson for the first time.

We immediately dug the clean air, funky saguaros (I remember hearing that word for the first time, the way it’s pronounced natively ‘swah-ro’ and the long length of time it took my mind to understand that this mellifluous sound represented those tall stately cacti with arms that has become America’s symbol for ‘desert’) and vast blue sky. We admired the indomitable croppings of art that waved from bus stops, overpasses, mailboxes and whole houses.

We’d been considering other smaller-scale arty scenes like Asheville or Austin, but what really tipped the scales in favor of the Old Pueblo  was a narrow, long bar with a ceiling like the underbelly of an old roller coaster, creepy animal trophy heads poking through the walls, a blue portrait of Bob Dylan, a chalkboard made out of an old car door, the best bartenders west of the Mississippi and an ever flowing current of talent and creativity in front of old storefront windows. Oh, and tater tots.

I’m talking about that long gone Tucson institution, Red Room. It was a subset of another institution, The Grill, an ancient (by the West’s standards) 24-hour diner that had seen better days, including what was left of the peeling, sixties psychedelic deer mural and ever-threatening-to-collapse ceiling – though their crispy, golden brown tater tots alone were worth a trip. Red Room was the satellite, the adjunct, the part of the establishment that actually closed at 2am. But to me it was the better part.

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