I’VE ARRIVED!

I’ve arrived! How so? My friend Louis found a used copy of LAYERS OF TIME at a thrift store in West Milford, NJ!

You’ve made it when you wind up in the used cd section.

He posted these pics earlier today (July 19) and I sat at my laptop thinking “Wow, someone decided to discard my cd. But now Louis owns it!” Hard to believe that this cd came out December 2015…ten years gone! (Maybe I should have called the blog Ten Years Gone, after the Led Zeppelin song?) So while I’m feeling slightly nostalgic, let me give you some interesting trivia about this cd…

1. The only song never performed live is “Dangerous Heat”. The title came from when I was in Nashville Summer NAMM, and the weather man said “It’s dangerous heat outside!”
2. The only songs played one time live were “Postcards From Mars”, “Instant Amnesia” and “Jigsaw Mind”.
3. “Slippery Gypsy” came from a very vivid description of Paul Gilbert on a YouTube video.
4. The first song written three years prior was “Too Far Below Zero”. I had a bassist who hated the song, said it was too 80s and too simple. His loss! It wound up being a crowd favorite. The title came from a store owner in Minnesota who said the weather was “too far below zero out there.”
5. When I opened for Lita Ford at Starland Ballroom for the first time (August 11, 2016), I purposely started my set with the title track because it’s a lumbering piece of music that suddenly gets faster. I had to mess with the crowd who wanted to hear uptempo 80s rock 🙂
6. The title track came from a tv show called REHAB ADDICT when host Nicole Curtis talked about peeling wallpaper off, calling it “layers of time”. In a strange coincidence, I saw an article in the NY Times about “layers of time”. And this was the last song I wrote and recorded for the album. BTW: Lacuna Coil has a song with this title…did they get the idea from me? Bueller? BUELLER?!

Recording this album was challenging and tedious but things worked out well. Sold really good too. Having big shows opening for Joe Lynn Turner, Lita Ford, Michael Angelo Batio, King’s X and Uli Roth helped. That was when I thought I was going somewhere…little did I know.

I remastered this album last year, made it sound brighter and added a bit more reverb to create a little extra cushioning. Some of the songs still hold up for me. A couple…well, it’s like seeing your yearbook photo years later. You ask “Who let me out of the house like that?” I feel that way with some of the riffs but overall it’s surprisingly good.

The album that followed three years later blew it away though…