I’m From Here
The title track of my 2025 album I’m From Here is about the distinctions between where you were born, where you’re from, and where you call home. It was an epiphany to discover that if I AM from a patch of dirt, it isn’t the one I thought.
In The Song
Trying to find your happy place in the midst of chaos. From my 2004 CD Voices From the Right Brain. Recorded in 2022 at the Cherry Brook House Concert series in Princeton NJ.
The Duck Pond
The Duck Pond tells the true story of a romance-novel-like agreement to meet a college girlfriend from 1978 ten years later at the Central Park lagoon (a.k.a. “the duck pond”). The lovely hand-painted lyric video was created by Lisa Bastoni. Also off I’m From Here.
Let It Fail
My real-world answer to Doctor Seuss’ Oh The Places You’ll Go. Recorded live at NERFA in 2024 by JB Nuttle. A lightly-augmented version of this performance is on I’m From Here.
For My Boys
My Father’s Day-themed song For My Boys is on my 2018 CD A Landscape of Ghosts. The song was also on the June 2021 Hudson Harding folk radio singles CD compilation, where it received national airplay. Christine Lavin also had a song on that compilation, heard mine, contacted me out of the blue, and made this video for me.
Jerry and The Mick
In August of 1995, Jerry Garcia and Mickey Mantle passed away within four days of each other. Although they were only eleven years apart in age, it seemed so clear that the fact they had such different followings was a generational thing—I loved The Grateful Dead, and my father was a big Mickey Mantle fan. I was surprised when the only generational coverage I read was the blowback when Jerry’s passing made the cover of Newsweek and they received angry letters for putting “That unrepentant drug-abusing so-and-so on the cover when Mickey Mantle was a goddamn American hero,” etc. It struck me that things often aren’t what they seem. Yes, kudos to Mantle for doing his big public “Don’t be like me, I was given so much, and I blew it” mea culpa, but it wasn’t widely known at the time that Jerry died in rehab. The song was on my 2004 album Voices From the Right Brain, but this is a more recent live recording.
McNamara’s War
My video of the song from my 2018 album A Landscape Of Ghosts about Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson. The song was heavily influenced by the Erol Morris film The Fog of War, which was an interview with McNamara near the end of his life. YouTube has labeled it as “age-restricted content” because it contains graphic Vietnam war photos. For this reason, embedding the video results in this scary-looking message. The video, however, will play if you click “Watch on YouTube.” It can also be seen here.
Ed McDermott’s Handy
I had a lot of time on my hands during the early days of the pandemic (didn’t we all?), so I re-learned the Gordon Bok finger-style masterpiece Ed McDermott’s Handy. There’s a lengthy description on YouTube of how the song figures into my early musical history and what it means to me.
A Landscape Of Ghosts
The title track of my 2017 CD, performed live at the CD release show at Club Passim in Cambridge. The video is from the low-resolution livestream, but the sound is directly from the board. Tim Roper on fiddle, Peter Tillotson on upright bass, Rudy Borkowski on piano, and Doug Kwarter (who produced the CD) on drums.
Sense of History
My take on vividly remembering the jarring events of the sixties while being a few years too young to personally be in the thick of them, and how John Lennon’s shooting effectively buried what remained. I wrote the song after Lennon was killed in 1980 and have recorded it several times. This is the version off my CD Shaker Chair. The video is amateurish, just using web photos that we’ve seen so many times they’re almost cliché, but that’s how I remember it.
Shine by Hewitt Huntwork
My rendition of my friend Hewitt Huntwork’s spectacular song Shine. Captured on cell phone by Lindsay Dodd at The Center for Arts in Natick (TCAN) on 6/27/2017 at Oen Kennedy’s birthday and open mic feature.