March 13th 2020

This was the beginning of the big change in my life as I’m sure it was for many of yours. I finished school attempting to pretend it was a normal day while watch the news out of the corner of my eye. Big changes were coming. By the end of the school day, we were told we would be teaching at home for at least two weeks. My gigs that weekend were a little odd but both restaurants were already adapting their practices. By Monday morning, we were home enjoying what we thought would be a short hiatus from our everyday hectic schedules.
Obviously, plans and the world changed within a few weeks. Everyone started to adjust to the new way of doing things. As a working musician who plays many dates a year (follow my pages to see how many), I was not accustomed to all this downtime. Even though Missed Opportunity was only out for a couple months, it made sense to use this time to write some new material. With that said, I decided upon the challenge: Write at least one song a week until I could get back out and start gigging. Rather than writing material commenting on the world as we knew it, I figured it would be best to tackle other types of songs. Everyone was writing those kinds of songs. Within a couple months, I had about 15 songs that I liked and thought it would be time to make a record…but that’s not what I came here to talk about. That album will be saved for another day.
By early summer, the shows were on and it was back to work. In fact, I never worked so much in my life! With the few free moments I had, I was working with the great Jon Irizarry in a safe and socially distant fashion on what would become a new rock and roll record. The tunes were coming along nicely and I was anticipating a summer 2021 release.
Then, out of nowhere by September and October 2020, the muse hit again. This time, the material commenting on the social and political situation that I didn’t want to write started to manifest itself. The songs were written and finalized all within three to four weeks. It was everything I wanted in a singer-songwriter record this time around: A concise statement (35-40 minutes) of topical material centered around one theme (compassion).
Considering the world in the moment, I didn’t know if it would be feasible to record this material at this time. Consequently, any delays in getting this material out would affect its impact as well as relevance. Within a few weeks, a plan was hatched. Right before Christmas, three men would enter a studio after getting tested for COVID-19 and record this record efficiently. The players would be Jon Irizarry (drums, keyboards, piano, percussion, vocals), Tom Askin (recording engineer, synthesizers, vocals), and the benevolent dictator…yours truly (guitars, bass, vocals). We managed to record the album over the course of 20 hours in 2 days. Everyone got to see their families for the holidays.
I was hoping to capture a moment in time with this record. I hope it captures you. Enjoy!