I wrote “Travelin’ Man” in the mid-1970’s for the band Harlequin, which I co-founded with violinist Joel Zifkin while we were students at McGill University. It became a mainstay in the band’s repertoire. “Travelin’ Man” segued into an unnamed instrumental written by Joel and me. The entire dual-song performance clocked…
“Lucky’s Café” is a barroom lament about looking for love in all the wrong places.
“The Illustrated Man” was written across decades. I think I wrote the lyrics in the late 70s. At the time I tried repeatedly to write the music for it but nothing clicked, so I just set it aside, neatly typed, for nearly 30 years. Finally, in the early-aughts, it came…
True crime, outlaws and antiheroes. You can’t get much more American than that. Some of my songs arrive in the form of a first-person narrative by an unexpected character. An outlaw or antihero works for me. I like the grittiness of Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.” I like a TV series…
When Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” hit the charts in August 1959 I had just turned six and was on the cusp of first grade. It’s fair to say that “Mack the Knife” owned the charts that fall and winter, charting for 26 weeks and spending nine of them…
My parents’ record collection was slim pickings when I was a kid. My dad mostly chose the records. He had Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Mitch (“I hate rock and roll”) Miller, The Harmonicats, 101 Strings, and, although my parents never attended the theater, Carousel, Oklahoma!, Hello Dolly! (so many exclamation points), West…