I looked up the last time I wrote my last full-length solo acoustic geetar tune. The song was “The Dog Seed Shuffle” and the date was December 21 2005. Dude! That’s, like, 10 years! Where does the time go?
I’ve always wondered when the next solo tune would come along, if at all. I wrote “Goldie” in 2014 with every intent of making a full length song but it ended up saying everything it needed to in just over 1:30, plus I guess I just wasn’t in the proper mindset to dive into writing a full tune. Acoustic songs are the hardest ones for me to get into the groove to get started – I need total peace, the kind of thing you don’t get much of living in NYC (not a complaint, just a fact!) I can render the organized chaos that is ICED INK until the cows come home, but mellowing out and making naked solo acoustic guitar pieces is another story. I think I’m getting back into the swing of it though, or so it seemed a couple of Saturdays ago (Feb. 13).
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If you’ve seen Donnie Darko and remember his solar plexus guiding him through the house I had an experience similar to that, except mine led me to one of my guitar cases under our bed instead of a gun in the closet. Thank goodness for that, because we don’t have a gun in our closet. If my solar plexus led me to such a thing that would mean someone would have had to break in to put it there. Either that or the cats could possibly put a gun in there, but I seriously doubt they would do something like that. They don’t seem like the type.
I opened the brown guitar case and picked up my beloved Taylor acoustic. I didn’t even check to see what tuning I last had it in, I just put my fingers down wherever they wanted to go. The cool thing about doing that, at least in this instance, is that I ended up coming up with a part that starts the song in the key of A. The guitar was tuned to open D. Had I given it a pre-strum and tune-up I probably would have defaulted to noodling in D instead. 2 parts instantly appeared (what ended up at :07 and 1:44 in the recording) and the next couple of hours were spent weaving them together into a complete tune. BADDABING.
Harmonics are my favorite thing ever to do on guitar. There’s lots of those per usual plus I can hear some Jim Campilongo influence that has sneaked its way into my playing in recent years rearing its head in this tune (thanks again for the heads up on him Johnny Cola!) The way he lets strings/notes sustain while he hops on over to other strings and continues to take care of business on those kinda blew my mind when I started going see him play. I’ve always been pretty good at that and wanted to work more of it into my own playing, but it wasn’t until we saw him working his magic 5 feet in front of us at a dive bar that something clicked. Since then I’m very slowly but Shirley figuring out how to work it in more when it’s called for. This might be my most string-ringy piece yet!
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I always felt a lil’ weird that I have solo acoustic tunes for my cats, my grandma’s car, snow, a Chihuahua named Poncho, corduroy pants, and bacon just to name a few things – yet not really anything for my wife. YEAH there’s the aforementioned “Goldie” song but I’m talking something more substantial than 1:34. A lot of, or perhaps 100% of that, has to do with all of my acoustic stuff being written before we knew each other existed. I coincidentally burned out on writing that stuff and put it to the side right around the time we met. Ten years later and that’s no longer the case – “Island View” is her official song, inspired by a story she told me last summer. After she told me I thought, “Well that’s cool.” What’s the story? Psh. I’m not telling. But as soon as I came up with those 2 initial bits on guitar I attached them to that story and wrote the rest with it in mind.
Here ye go, Goldie – Island View. Crank it!
