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If you’ve visited this website during the last couple of years, you might have thought I had died and no one had bothered to shut my website down. I admit it- my website maintenance has been essentially non-existent. But that was then and this is now! I don’t defend the lack of maintaining my website in the past, but I can explain it: I’ve just been too busy to deal with it. A variety of occurrences have finally conspired to cause me to refocus my attention on this website. Since the release of Slider- Ambient Excursions for Pedal Steel Guitar, other than a couple of film scoring jobs, I mostly found myself producing and/or engineering projects for other artists (evidence available on the discography page of this website!). Most of this time I had multiple concurrent ongoing projects; I struggled to meet all of the demands of my work and personal life.
Even very shortly after the release of Slider, I had plans to release a follow-up to it. There was an option in my contract with Hearts Of Space Records, and the president of the label had given me no reason to think we wouldn’t do a second album together. Then the Hearts Of Space Records catalog was sold to a bigger record company that neither had any interest in promoting Slider, nor any interest in following it up. However, amidst all this disinterest, they were unwilling to release me from my contract, thereby maintaining an option to call theirs anything I might record, for the duration of the contract. As my relationship with this company devolved, I vowed to myself that I’d rather never make another album than make one that would be released by this company. Then there was 9/11; for a while, I questioned whether wiggling the air was a noble enough pursuit to continue doing it. Then my beloved mother-in-law was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. My wife, Michele, and I hunkered down, took her into our home and cared for her until she died. All the while I was still fighting to get out of my record-contract-gone-bad. To be honest, with so many depressing things going on in my life, I wasn’t inspired to make new music. I want my music to be uplifting; I’m not a good enough actor to have put a happy face on during that period of time. Then my production and engineering workload just went crazy. As much as I like the work, after years of multiple concurrent projects I began to feel like I was on a treadmill set to high, and I couldn’t get off. In the back of my mind, getting ever-stronger, was the impulse to make more of my own music.
At just the right moment, out of the blue, I received an email from Thomas Dolby. He made me a couple offers I couldn’t refuse, first asking me if I’d be interested in playing pedal steel on his first new album in quite a while; of course I said yes, subsequently overdubbing on Seventeen Hills- just released on Amerikana, available at www.thomasdolby.com and includes contributions from Jeffrey Wash (fretless bass on both Slider and Hybrid), Mark Knopfler and Natalie MacMaster. The other offer he made was just as compelling, but as it turns out, more important to helping me get off the treadmill I described earlier. In addition to being a musical phenomenon in his own right, he’s the musical director for the TED conference (www.ted.com). He asked me if I’d be interested in performing at the TED conference. I’ve known about the TED for a long time, probably because my older brother, Shel, is a hacker and I grew up around him and his hacker friends. Although I never had that brand of intelligence, I was exposed to a lot of interesting things because of my brother and his friends- TED being one of them. I was honored to have been asked to audition to appear. Thomas also liked the fretless bass playing he’d heard on Slider, and asked me if I’d consider performing as a duo with the bass player from Slider, Jeffrey Wash. Of course I said yes! Jeffrey also agreed to give it a try. The only hurdle in our way of getting this gig was that we’d have to write some duo music that we could perform, then demo it, and finally submit the demo to the committee at TED, for approval (or rejection). Thomas and I agreed that it would probably be necessary for me to use a looping device to make the music interesting enough to hold the audience’s interest- I had explained to Thomas that watching someone play pedal steel isn’t very visually interesting, with both hands, both knees and both feet using relatively fine motion to play the instrument. I bought a looping device (a Roland RC-50) and started writing.
A couple of months before Thomas’s email, I found myself in a couple of production jobs that were increasingly frustrating. My wife Michele and I had planned a Hawaiian vacation with various other family members. Three weeks on the Big Island. I packed my miniature studio so I could write for the TED audition. I also took a bunch of other work-related projects. After about a week of spending a fair amount of time taking care of the work I had packed, I started to unwind and dig into writing music. Two weeks of this and I had an epiphany. I HAD TO get off the treadmill and re-focus on my own music. Once I made this decision, it took me a year to finish the four albums I had in production at that time, but then I finally began working seriously on new material. In the meantime, the “committee” at TED said NO to me and Jeffrey. But this was not the first time either of us had seen rejection! Jeffrey and I were both excited about the potential of the music we had just created. More on this later.
Although during the period of time I was exceptionally busy producing and engineering other artists I didn’t do much writing, I actually had been working pretty hard at preparing for doing new music. I’ve been riding two bicycles simultaneously for a long time. What I mean by this is that I’ve been a musician, (lucky to have found myself working in many extraordinary circumstances as such), but I’ve also been very lucky to spend a huge portion of my life working in recording studios as either an engineer or producer, or both concurrently. Sound is really important to me, as is music- I really don’t think of music and sound as mutually exclusive. When I signed with Hearts of Space Records, I almost immediately went into production on Slider. Sadly, due to a variety of reasons, I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for, or for that matter produce the album, so I didn’t have any time to address some nagging issues I’d been experiencing with my pedal steel and its amplification and recording chain. I had built my rig for my time with American Music Club. That band played pretty loud, and I was always scared of sounding too country; my system was designed around these conditions. Although I’m not unhappy with the sound of Slider, once it was finished I vowed to build a system that better matched the sound I imagined I’d like to be getting for small ensemble, relatively quiet music. I really wanted to get to the essential nature of the sound of my instrument. Ultimately, this meant researching, finding, buying and often modifying: a new pedal steel, new pickups, new cabling, a new volume pedal, new amplifier, new speaker, new microphone, new preamp, new compressor and new DAW I/O. Gearheads, read on. If you don't much care about such technicalities, you should skip to the next paragraph... I went to the International Steel Guitar Convention in St. Louis to put my hands on as many pedal steels as I could. The winner was a Zum double neck 10 string Hybrid model. I am not a Zum endorsee. As far as I know, I paid full price for mine, but nonetheless, all I can say about this instrument is that it has been inspirational since the first time I laid my hands on it. Bruce Zumsteg, builder of the Zum, is one of my heroes. I am an endorsee for EMG pickups, Evans amps and Eminence speakers. I use these products and sought out the endorsement of these companies because I love the sound of their product. When I took delivery of my Zum, I tried a number of different pickups on it. To be able to make the sounds I want to make, hum is not an option. One of my stylistic modus operandi is to pluck a note or chord, then gradually increase its sustain by swelling the volume pedal. If a pickup hums, the more I swell the volume pedal, the more the sound morphs from what I played, into hum. This means I can’t use a single coil pickup. But I don’t like the way humbucking pickups sound on pedal steel- the high end isn’t open enough for my ear. EMG pickups solve this problem. My previous steel had EMG 40J pickups. For the Zum, I settled on 40CS pickups. Magnifique! I play through the Evans hybrid (tube front end, solid state back end) amp, and use an Emminence Commonwealth 15” speaker. Although in order for me to be happy with it, it had to be modified by the genius (and I don’t use this term lightly) Keith Reinegger at The Amp Lab in Cupertino, CA, I use a Hilton volume pedal. I use Mogami Platinum Guitar cable with G & H connectors. On the recording side, I use a vintage Sony C37A vacuum tube microphone, a DW Fearn VT-2 vacuum tube preamp, and a Pendulum OCL-2 vacuum tube compressor. For safety’s sake (being a musician or an engineer is demanding enough work, doing both simultaneously usually means my engineering suffers a bit) I also record an (insurance…) direct signal using an Éclair Engineering Services Evil Twin direct box, and with the help of a John Cuniberti Reamp can sometimes survive those over-zealous milliseconds that go unnoticed until it’s way too late, by reamping the direct signal (which I purposefully record at a relatively cautious level…).
It took me quite a while to compile all this new gear (I got it one piece at a time…) and to get it all working the way I wanted it to, but I finally did, pretty much just in time to do the TED demos. Even though I didn’t succeed in landing that gig, I was reminded how much I love writing and producing my own music, and that I was LONG OVERDUE to make a new album. The silly thing is, that I found myself making TWO albums. The demos Jeffrey and I had made were suggesting a new sound to me. I’ve always loved music put out by the ECM label. My duo music with Jeffrey seemed ripe to push in that direction. Our demos and additional music are evolving into an album’s worth of material, featuring Jeffrey Wash on fretless bass, Jason Lewis on drums and either John R. Burr or Rich Kuhns on piano, and of course me, on pedal steel. As I write, this album is about half produced, and probably won’t be done until late in 2010.
But don’t worry Slider fans! Enough people have made it clear to me that they wanted a follow-up to Slider, that I felt very energized to do another small ensemble, no trapset, relatively ambient album, Hybrid. As I’ve been preparing to “launch” Hybrid, I’ve been sorting through emails I’ve received since the release of Slider. So many kind people have been so encouraging! I’m very much self-driven, but knowing that the music I’ve created is actually being enjoyed by people all over the world has really been deeply satisfying. Thanks to everyone who has either purchased Slider, or has made it clear to me that my music has been meaningful to them. Although Hybrid follows in Slider’s footsteps, it is unique. I feel that Slider, done relatively quickly and with a lot of input from Hearts Of Space Records represents a toe in the water. With Hybrid, I really wanted to dig as deeply into my musical soul as I could. I took more time both writing and producing it. Also, whereas the only two guest artists on Slider were Jeffrey Wash on fretless bass, and my cat Hana, whose purring was the rhythmic basis to a track dedicated to her own existence: Homage pour la Grande Fromage [Michele and I LOVE our Hana!], many esteemed guests grace the tracks of Hybrid. I believe these guests greatly enhance the musical experience embedded in the tracks on Hybrid. The very first sound you hear on track 1, Pohaka La, is the ukulele of Jake Shimabukuro, followed shortly thereafter by the return of Jeffrey Wash on fretless bass. Back in the 1980’s when I was a staff engineer at Dragon Studios, I met Kent Darnielle, who came in to record some of the most imaginative solo piano compositions I’d ever heard. We’ve collaborated numerous times since then. I asked him to write a piece for piano and pedal steel for Hybrid. I liked the result, track 2- Maya, so much that I asked him to write a second one as well: track 10, Silenzi. Kent plays piano on both of these pieces; they’re the only pieces on Hybrid I didn’t write myself. On track 3, Gleaming Towers, Salar Nader joins me on tabla, and once again, Jeffrey Wash on fretless bass. On track 6, Arctic Front, I’m joined by cellist Matt Brubeck and once again by Salar Nader on tabla. Real Vocal String Quartet (Irene Sazer and Alisa Rose on violin, Dina Maccabee on viola and Jess Ivry on cello) join me on track 7, Okanagan Jubilee. On track 8, Dust Bowl Revisited, John Loose plays tabla and David Immerglück plays electric guitar. On track 12, There But 4, Paul Olguin joins me on bass and Karl Perazzo on conga. Much to the credit of Stephen Hill, Slider is almost a continuous listening experience from the beginning of the album, to the end. My guess is that many people, who've enjoyed listening to Slider many times, may not know where one track leaves off and the next track starts. I really like this quality of the album. For better or for worse, Hybrid is a different experience. I really wanted to stretch my imagination in the making of this album. Whereas I view Slider almost as a dream experience, I wanted Hybrid to feel more like traveling, offering different experiences as the album progresses from one track to the next. Once the album is launched (some time this spring [2010]), if you navigate to the Hybrid track on this website, you'll be able to navigate to individual pages dedicated to each track on the album, each page offering a bit of a "back-story", a clip from the track and in some cases, some visual images, each of which support the history and my thoughts about the track.
When I took control of the rights to Slider, I formed Wiggling Air Records to re-release it. Hybrid will be the first record to be launched from its inception on Wiggling Air Records. As such, I’m learning a lot about how to launch an album! As of slightly before Christmas, 2009, production is complete, and the audio has been mastered (by David Glasser at Airshow Mastering in Boulder, CO). Graphic artwork is being directed by Victor Krummenacher and is well on its way to being completed. Technically, I could conceivably be ready to release the album some time in late February, but it’s looking more likely that release won’t happen until April, or possibly as late as June. The reason for this has to do with how this paragraph began. Being a bit of a novice record company owner, I probably should have begun investigating foreign licensing possibilities earlier on- I’m told by people who know more about this process than I do, that synchronizing release worldwide is the way to go, and that process takes at least a few months. The problem when one is wearing the hats of both record label and artist is that during production, I was too engrossed with making the album to want to shift my focus toward what I would want to do with it once it was made. I guess it’s okay though- for the kind folks who occasionally email me asking where Son of Slider or Slider II is, it’s been 9 years(!) since Slider was originally released; I guess a few more months is just a drop in that bucket...
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