Rain Play


I have been organizing and packing and throwing away stuff for several weeks now. A 20 yard dumpster was filled with some of the detritus of thirty years – I moved into this house on my birthday in 1992 – and what I wanted to keep was moved into storage. I was exhausted from the work and hadn’t played guitar at all in a couple of weeks. This afternoon a lovely thunderstorm approached the house and I decided to play guitar accompanied by rain and thunder. The house is empty and the reverb in this room is now enormous. I leaned my iPhone against the guitar case and it recorded my guitar and the rain and some thunder.

My friends say it sounds sad. I say that it should sound sad because it was wonderful to live here and to make music here. I am not moving because I don’t like this house and the studio. I am moving because if I don’t move now I will never move. That would be okay, too, but I want another adventure and now is the time.

I recorded around twenty albums in the studio that’s less than fifty yards from this room. The first album that came out of here was ¡Viva!. We mixed the album here after recording it on the road in 1994. The 1996 release Opium was the first album to be recorded and completed here. In those days we still mastered every album at The Mastering Lab in Los Angeles. A few years later we took the late and great Doug Sax’s (who mastered albums for Pink Floyd!) advice who asked me why I was still coming to him for mastering when the material already sounded perfect. So we started to master albums at my studio as well. Innamorare and christmas + santa fe were released in 2000, Little Wing in 2001. If I remember correctly Little Wing was the first album mastered here. In the Arms of Love was the first album released on my label SSRI, in 2002. La Semana, released in 2004, was the first album I engineered by myself. Then came Winter Rose, in 2005, One Guitar in 2006, the binaural album Up Close in 2008, followed by The Scent of Light in the same year. That album was followed by POP in 2010, Dune in 2012, three-oh-five and Bare Wood in 2014, Waiting n Swan in 2015, slow in 2016, The Complete Santa Fe Sessions in 2018, Fete in 2019, and finally the Lockdown and Full versions of vision 2020 last year.

Now I want to do something different. I’ll tell you more about my plans soon…

Flying

This morning this stretch of road looked like space, three dimensional and with thousands of little spaceships flying around at great speed. Cottonwood season.

Good Morning

Running out of beans in the espresso machine I resorted to hand-grinding some beans I found in the freezer and made drip coffee. Can you *almost* smell it?

Red or Blue


After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth.

Lensic Performance + New Album

The stage at the Lensic Theater on 8. October:

2015 10 08 Lensic

We had a great time performing for a sold-out audience here in Santa Fe. Thanks to everyone who came and supported a good cause. I was most impressed by the fellow who drove all the way from Houston to experience the concert. :-)

CDs of the new album arrived the day before the concert and so we brought some to the venue to sell. Since Marita: Shadows + Storms in 1989, this is, I think, the first time that an album of mine premiered on Santa Fe radio – last Wednesday at KBAC Radio Free Santa Fe – and was first sold in Santa Fe. That makes me smile.

I updated the webpage for Waiting n Swan today. It now contains previews for all of the songs. These previews are good quality and are in stereo, but are limited to one minute each. I will add links to iTunes (download), Amazon (CD and download) and HDTracks (high definition download) as I find them – the official release date is Friday 10/23. Unfortunately the music will NOT be available from our ListeningLounge because of the licensing process involved. We will, however, sell the CD at our concerts.