This is a demo of a song I wrote about a year and a half ago. It's probably not the final arrangement (or even the final key), but I like the way it came out:

Your Independence Day

Cover songs

These three songs I recently recorded as an example of some of the material I perform in my live solo shows:

Mist-Covered Mountains

Ferry 'Cross The Mersey

Wild Mountain Thyme

Earn Enough For Us
The first song I recorded with Apple's Garageband, spring 2004. A pretty faithful cover of a song by XTC from their 1986 album Skylarking.

Between Something and Nothing
My second song in Garageband. This was a minor hit for The Ocean Blue back in the 80's.

Wake Up
My third Garageband song, another very faithful XTC cover, from their album The Big Express. I did this primarily to see if it was possible to duplicate the rather complex production on the song.

No One Is To Blame
My own arrangement of the 80's hit by Howard Jones. The vocals have been touched up, but I think they still need to be re-recorded.

From A Whisper To A Scream
Glenn Tilbrook had been touring solo to promote his own solo album, "The Incomplete Glenn Tilbrook," and on the tour, he'd been getting requests to do "From A Whisper To A Scream," a song on which he had done a duet with Elvis Costello, which appeared on Elvis' album "Trust". So, who sang the Elvis part? Somebody from the audience. In November 2002, Glenn came around to Arlington, to club Iota. This time, I was the only volunteer. He prefaced the song by saying it would be a "crueler" version, where if the audience didn't like me, they could vote me off, in the spirit of reality TV.

With that in mind, we launched into the song. I sang Elvis Costello's part, Glenn sang his part and played guitar, the crowd were kind, the sound system was good, and the song was a rousing success, bringing me lots of compliments afterwards.

And that was that, or so we thought. It turns out somebody at the show was secretly taping it. Ellen got wind of it on an online chat list, and got a copy of the show on CD-ROM. It was taped with a tiny hand-held tape recorder, so the quality is a bit shaky, but you can hear it pretty well.

Check out the *Batteries Not Included page.