Eyes of God "Eyes of God" was the last song we recorded for the CD. I played it from Minneapolis into Chris's answering machine in Venice when I wrote it, and a week or so later he was in the Twin Cities and had the guitar parts figured out. We recorded track after track of Chris playing acoustic and electric guitars and harmonica, and then added the rest of the vocals, drums and bass. J.R. calls it 'building the house from the roof down.' The Rev. Peggy Tuttle once told me that she thought I had a genuinely grateful heart. That's what lead to me writing this song. The first verse is about going through one physical setback after another and coming out the other side. The second verse is about the wonderful group of people that I have exercised with at The Marsh for over ten years, including Fran, June, Mary Lou, Cathy, Kathy, GayLynn, Lois, Barb, Marion, Penny, Marnie, Don, Doug, Kelsey, Diego, Tom, Jo Anne, Al and many others, and all my trainers, Monica, Diane, Shanna, Erin, Linda, Mary, Paul and David. The third verse is about getting out and volunteering; conducting Sunday services at the prison, feeding the homeless at Loaves and Fishes, and bringing communion to the shut-ins at our church, trying to give some small thing back for all the grace I've received over the years. Hand in Hand Every time I hear the opening line of this song, I'm amazed by the economy and depth of the lyric, "Found myself in the Greatest Generation, minus one." It's not often that a songwriter can express the identity of an entire generation in one eight-word phrase, and here Chris has done that. The last verse with its reference to "sat talking with Jimi..." is about the night that Chris partied in Jimi Hendrix' hotel room at the old Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis in 1968. No, he won't tell you any more than that about it, so don't ask. When we recorded "Hand in Hand," Chris and J.R played their guitar parts at the same time in separate studios with a window between them, Chris on acoustic and J.R. on electric. Their live guitar interplay was so interesting and rhythmic that we ended up adding just a bass guitar and snare to the tracks, allowing the guitars to take center stage. A few vocal harmonies here and there on my part, an electric lead guitar by Chris, and the song sounded complete. Angel Nan and I have been married for over thirty years, starting out as two inexperienced, naive kids, and coming to the point of being two experienced, naive adults. "Angel" is about forgiveness, acceptance, love, and humility, all the stuff Nan has taught me in those years together. I have permanent brain damage to my visual and verbal memory. As a consequence, I tend to drive past my freeway exits a lot, and have a difficult time remembering how to get back to places I have been to before. Hence, the lyrics, "You can give him directions, he won't know where to start/ So little brain, but such a big heart." All This Junk My parents were divorced when I was six, and had a child custody settlement that had me living half the week with my mother and half with my father until I got a driver's license when I was sixteen. Both of my parents were wildly alcoholic, and my childhood was filled with adventure and risky situations. I learned a lot of life skills in those years that have served me well, like self-sufficiency, thinking ahead, preparation, and conciliation. I also learned a lot of junk, like what it feels like to be neglected, abandoned, constantly criticized.... all that junk. I had written the first two verses a long time ago, and had never figured out how to take the song any further, since they pretty much summed up my feelings about my parents. Chris recommended that I add verses from the father's point of view, but I've never been able to figure out why either one of my folks did what they did. I couldn't put myself inside my father's way of thinking. Chris wrote the verses instead, using his relationship with his father as the model. It's important to me to explain this, because Chris' mother, Peg, is a fantastic woman, one of my favorite people on the planet. She is as different from the way my mother was as a person could possibly be. Chris' father and my father, however, were cut from the same cloth. The day we recorded "All This Junk," an old friend of Chris Mulkey's, Chris Weber, dropped in to observe the session. As we were working on the song, Chris Weber tossed out a few great ideas, and, noticing that he had brought a guitar with him, I asked if he was interested in playing on the song. Soon he was laying down beautiful finger picking guitar parts, and I turned to Mulkey and said, "Who is this guy?" I had known him through Mulkey slightly, for years, but knew nothing about him, not even that he was a guitarist. Mulkey said, "This is the Chris Weber that used to own the Podium guitar shop in Dinkytown. He was one of the guitarists on Dylan's 'Blood on the Tracks' CD." Then J.R. chimed in with electric guitar and bass, and we had these beautiful interlocking acoustic and electric parts from three great players. I love listening to the guitars on this song. Chris Weber, it was honor to have you play with us, and thank you! Orlando Canto Chris was in the Twin Cities for a quick two-day visit with his mom. We were able to squeeze in a recording session, although it had to be early in the morning on the Sunday he was returning to Venice. Chris walked in that morning and told us that he had written a new song based on an article he had just read in the LA Times about an incident at a police station in Columbia. Orlando Ropero was a ten year-old boy who was given 35 cents by a group of rebels to ride a bicycle to a soda stand near a local police station. Unaware that the bicycle was packed with the plastic explosive C4, Orlando drew close to the police station, and the bike was detonated by a remote trigger. Orlando's arms and legs were blown off, and he bled to death in the street. No policemen were injured in the explosion. On the morning that we recorded "Orlando Canto," Chris went straight into the studio and laid down the song live, exactly as it sounds now, with mandolin, harp, and vocal. After he left for the airport, I added a few harmonies here and there, and we were finished. Chris's vocalizations during the harmonica solo are in tribute to Woody Guthrie's harp style, he told me. To me, Orlando Canto is a classic protest song, honest and straightforward, just like Woody Guthrie's songs. Must be a Prisoner My friend, Dic Rahders, took the photograph in the CD for this song as I was undergoing brain surgery at Lawrence Livermore Labs in 1987. This particular procedure, which was experimental then, involved being bolted into a custom fitted mask for hours at a time over six weeks while a beam of radiation very precisely deposited radioactive ions in the center of my brain. The good news is that it was non-invasive, unlike my first brain surgery six months earlier. This song is about those months in the hospital during 86-87, and the people who looked after me. I hope that it also can be interpreted to reflect any situation where your choices have been taken away from you. The "atomic sunlight in my veins" lyric refers to a test I had at UCB called a Xenon CAT scan, in which a radioactive material was injected into my bloodstream and charted through my veins. It was a truly hallucinogenic experience. Just Like Jesus This is a great wake-up song. Put it on first thing in the morning, on your way to work, wherever. It gets all the body rhythms and spiritual synapses boogying in the right direction. Chris told me that the first verse is about Jesus the man. The second verse is Jesus the minister. Verse three is Jesus' relationship with God, and verse four is Jesus as Lord. I love performing this song onstage with Chris. The back and forth vocal parts seem to create an urgent energy that lights up the audience. The day we were recording "Just Like Jesus," I had to leave the session early, because I was coordinator for a dinner that night at Holy Rosary Church in Minneapolis, where we would be feeding approximately 300-400 homeless folks. I hated to leave the session, and apologized to Chris and JR, saying, "I've got to go and feed the homeless tonight, guys. It's time to get the food cooking." Chris looked through the control room window from behind a microphone in the studio, and said only three words: "Just like Jesus." Hacking Steven Alexander Hacking was the son of my mom's drinking buddies, Gladys and Ronnie Hacking. Steve and I would be thrown together every weekend at his house or at a bar, as my mother and Glady and Ronnie got profoundly drunk. We went on vacations together as an extended family for years, Steve and I playing somewhere as far as we could get from our parents while they drank. We had countless harrowing and mortifying adventures with the three of them. Once we were on a borrowed cabin cruiser in the middle of Lake Minnetonka when Ronnie blew the engine. We drifted for hours before someone found us, the three adults so hopelessly drunk that they were helpless. Someone from another boat came onboard and took us into shore. If we were at a bar that had a live band, Glady would often walk onstage and take the microphone away from the singer and start singing "We are Poor Little Lambs Who have lost their Way." Several times she fell off the stage and seriously injured herself, leaving her with broken bones, black eyes, or cuts Ronnie would have to stop the car over and over to get out and "toss his cookies" on our way home from the bars. When we were really young, six or eight, we thought he was literally throwing cookies away and we were angry. In those early years, Hacking and I would refer to our parents between ourselves as "being in that mood" when they were drunk. We had no idea that their behavior was caused by alcohol. We thought they somehow got into a strange party mood when they were together. Later, of course, we realized the truth, and Steve would taunt them, "You're drunk, you're drunk!" in a slurred voice, swaying and falling over. Ronnie, who had severe ulcers, drank bourbon and milk, and would pretend that he was laughing with Steve. For the song, I wrote verse after verse, and it was (hard to believe) actually longer than the eight-minute version on the CD. Eventually, though, with Chris coaching me, I pared the story down to be mostly about our time together and apart that last night, the funeral, and Lakewood Cemetery. Some stories, I guess, just have too many angles, too many ways you could go, too many experiences and lessons involved to be narrowed down completely in one song. All the time we knew each other, we never called each other Steve or Guy, but rather "Hacking" and "Drake," which was common among all our friends. Drowning in Your Love I was sitting in my office one day looking out the window, and saw my daughter, Holley, and her boyfriend, Matt, romping in the driveway in a pouring rain, laughing, screaming, and getting unbelievably soaking wet. I picked up my guitar and wrote the lines, "I saw you walking down that stormy street/ Rain on your face, splashing your feet/ I said 'Look at you, what you've done/ I can't believe how far you've come." That was all. I couldn't think of anything else to write. I sat on it for a week or so, until the next time Chris was in the Twin Cities and we were in the studio working on a different song. I played it for him, and said that I had no idea where to go from there. He said that my problem was that these were the last lines of the song, not the first. He said, "Write the verses that come before, not after this one." "Write them about water," he said, "and call it "Drowning in Your Love." Then he played the chorus right out of his head exactly the way it is now on the CD. I sat in the control room and wrote the first two sets of verses in one continuous flow. (Just like water!) We captured Chris' guitar parts, wrote and sang the lyrics, laid down J.R.'s bass tracks and it was finished. It was the first song we recorded for the CD. Work Chris refers sometimes to songwriting as "downloading." In other words, sometimes the idea for a song will flow into your head, words and music simultaneously, over a period of a few hours or days. I downloaded "Work" years ago as an a cappella chant. One day I sang it for JR and Chris in the studio, and soon JR programmed a beat, grabbed a guitar, and with Chris on harp we laid it down. The confused monologue in the middle of the song is there exactly where it happened while I was recording the vocal tracks. JR left it in the mix and we got used to it, so it's never been replaced by a lead guitar part, which had been the plan. At least it hasn't been so far. The Stream I found myself many years ago in a situation where I had to find a way to cope with pain. Painkillers were only able to take certain amount of the edge off, and the side effects, for me, were terrible. At the time I was on my back in Fairview Southdale Hospital, experiencing a ruptured blood vessel in my brain that would not stabilize enough for surgery for over two months. The continuous bleed was excruciating. I was not allowed to lift my head off the flat pillow, even at times having my head sandbagged and my body strapped to the table so that I wouldn't move. I was given a copy of Shakti Gawain's book, "Creative Visualization," and began to visualize my pain as a continuous stream that flows in, but also flows out. By visualizing the stream for hours at a time, I was able to cope, to keep the pain and the fear at a level where I didn't think I was going to go insane. My colleague at Dale Carnegie Training, Robin Engstrom, is a professional soloist at one of the largest congregations in the Twin Cities. As we were teaching a class one afternoon together, I asked her, "Would you like to sing with me on a song we're recording this weekend?" She said, "yes" right away. When she started singing the parts on "The Stream," it was so beautiful that I got all emotional about it. When I tried to call her later to tell her how grateful I was, I got so choked up I could hardly get the words out. When she hits that three-part harmony at the end of the song, it still gets to me. Later, Aisha Baker stopped by the session to say "Hi" to J.R., and she offered to sing as well. Aisha, with her totally unique, wonderful voice, does those beautiful harmonies on the bridge, "Some got their old man river..."     "I and the Village" The album cover was designed by Mike Schuetze based on the painting by Marc Chagall.