Songs from Wayward Youth

This album is about just starting out.  WARNING: It contains explicit hope, terror, and a clueless bravado particular to the young.

The wayward Youth is introduced in a Slade oldie called “Talk to Gilda,” the only cut that actually was recorded when I still looked like that boy on the album cover.

I didn’t mean for it to, but the album tells a story about a brash young rocker — remotely like me, I suppose — who meets “the cutest thing that God has yet conceived,” and her love transforms him into an actual human being.  Good women have a way of doing that.  The first eight songs, then, step lively … but I think it’s the ballads (cuts 4 and 10), agonizing over the need for love and a novice’s fear of it, that are my favorites in this collection.

My thanks to Darrell Vance, who wrote the nakedly vulnerable “I Need You Tonight”. Thanks, too, to Bob Dylan for permission to record “Gotta Serve Somebody” which in this context alludes to more than the metaphysical. Finally, thanks to my colleagues and friends: the creative dynamo, producer/musician Bradford “Lefty” Dawson; and Zen-fully rigorous and insightful producer/recording artist, Ken “Green-Man” Eros.

“I Got Plans” is dedicated to the memory of my inspiring friends, Frederick Coffin (he wrote the infectious “Aggravated Uphill Climb”), Robin Welch (who cowrote “Drunk Enough” and “The Great Divide”), and Gilda Radner (whose legacy lives on).  I miss you.

Love and big wimps to former band mates Mark Whitten, Gary Pepper, and Mark Horn.