About the recording:

Charles Judge, a keyboard player, composer, programmer and songwriting buddy from Los Angeles, came up with this compelling music. After listening to the basic tracks a few times I asked Charles if he wouldn't mind if I tried my hand at writing lyrics for it. A couple of months later, after I wrote what I felt might work for the track, I went back to LA and met Charles at A&M Studios. There my producer and close friend Stephen Barncard - who was chief engineer of A&M at the time - had synched two 24 track 2" recorders in the small control room at studio C - a magic room with much JuJu. Steve loaded all the tracks Charles had recorded into his sequencer onto the mutli-track machines, followed by Charles laying down the sax solo, bass and some other goodies. By the end of the evening Charles parts were done, and Barncard and I were left rolling our eyes in amazement at Charles musical wizardry and technical savvy.

At a later date I came back to A&M and with Barncard as helmsman had a recording session for lead vocals and rhythm guitar. I recorded two tracks of electric guitar with my Gibson ES 335, with one placed on the left and the other on the right sides of the sound spectrum. I remember thinking the key was pretty low for me to sing, and I that I had never really recorded anything where my voice was so down in the valley of my register. But I came around to feeling it might be nice for a change. At one point I doubled the vocal an octave higher ala Marvin Gaye - but through the vicissitudes of time that version wound up with some audio artifacts, so we opted for this take which still has some doubling near the very end.

As usual in a lot of projects Steve and I have been involved in there wasn't a giant budget for mix time so we mixed after the vocal session by the seat of our pants, each of us manning different faders for all the instruments and textures that Charles had conjured up.

Charles currently resides in Nashville, where he is very in demand as a keyboard session cat.

About the song:

On the flight home to Kauai listening to Charles' track through my Walkman, I had some ideas for the lyrics. I fleshed them out in a couple of weeks between windsurf sessions at Makua - always finding inspiration in the waves. Sometimes just sailing out there by myself the ideas would come, unbidden. OK so I'm not re-inventing the wheel or anything with my lyrics or story-lines, but still it's nice to feel connected to that stream of ideas and lyics finding you when least expected, because so much of the craft, for me at least, is really working at it, chisiling and sculpting the thing into a shape of some kind over a period of time.

Sometimes you just want you're world thoroughly rocked to help change your perspective and free yourself of the thoughts and beliefs that just bog you down and bring you nowhere. Sometimes it is a conscious decision to get unstuck and sometimes it just happens through life's many lessons and upheavals - whatever the way, it is good to find new direction and meaning.