About the song:

I remember exactly who I was writing about in 'Fear of Falling', and I wished would she open up to me like a blooming flower in the burning desert and unleash all the love she never knew she had, unleash all the love I thought I ever wanted, or some other such madness. Regardless, its the same old story of either holding back out of fear or really diving in and discovering where it leads to. Okay it usually leads to shitsville but not always, and we have to have a shred of hope right?

I came up with the title and the bluesy E minor groove and my co-writer Bobby David and I took it from there lyric-wise, back and forth for a week till we felt like we had it. Bobby's good buddy and writing partner Ray Kennedy, would pop in and out of the house they shared, coming by to see how the tune was progressing. I don't know what he made of our style, such as it was, of team songwriting - constantly throwing out ideas to each other only to constantly throw out each others ideas - till something really stuck. But whatever the style, we always wound up with something to show for our efforts. Always thought I could hear someone like Bonnie Raitt or Ray Charles recording 'Fear of Falling', but since there is little likelihood of that happening in this lifetime - especially in Ray's case - I'm thinking about possibly recording a new version on CD #6.


About the recording:

Singer songwriter and larger-than-life character of characters was Bobby David, one of my Nashville writing partners. Back in 1984 we had written 'Our Little Secret' which wound up on 'The Island' CD, and was such a huge critical and financial success that I retired and never had to work another day in my life. But I enjoyed working and especially with brothers like Bobby, God love 'em. I never tired of his over-the-top enthusiasm for whatever song we were writing, and always got a kick out of the hair-ball stunts and shenanigans he devised out in the real world outside his writing quarters. The dude had stories upon stories, major pizzaz and a non-stop sense of humor. Thus visiting Bobby was always not only fruitful song-wise, it was also quite entertaining.

This was my third or fourth visit to Nashville, after having lived there for a short while in 1971. For this recording Bobby brought me over to the home studio of a friend of his where, according to Bobby, we could get a good quick demo done to the tune of two-hundred bucks. I went for that in a heartbeat. It didn't take long to figure out Bobby's buddy was an amazingly talented all-around musician and engineer too. In no time at all the guy whipped up some drum grooves into a sequencer of some kind and provided me with a groove for recording my Steinberger electric rhythm guitar track**. The aforementioned studio whiz then proceeded to blaze through electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass and keyboards one right after the other. Soon it was my turn for vocals. Bobby didn't like the way I was singing it for some odd reason, maybe because he thought he should be singing it, or singing it better, but whatever, we got the job done and I have always loved the mystery man's guitar solo. Turns out he played in the group Alabama.

** Gotta interject here, that Steinberger electric was and still is a guitar you could plug into anything and with those three EMG pickups and active electronics would sound decent if not great. It's made of carbon kevlar and there's no wood involved here at all, the sustain is forever. The guitar was also perfect for traveling with due to its lack of headstock. And with it's with 5 position Trans-Trem step-shiftable whammy bar you could choose to play in 5 different pitches. On yet another aside within an aside, Joe Walsh turned me onto Steinbergers when he visited Kauai back in 1984 - playing his thru a small gas-can amp in his room at the Princeville Hotel. I bought mine on my next trip to NYC soon thereafter, and still use it for recording.