Recordings

‘Sliding To Your Destiny’ is a project I’ve been chipping away at over the last couple of years. It's a twelve-track CD of my original songs. I laid down all the tracks in my studio at home and spent a couple of days with Chris Ralf adding drums to five of them.

Sound engineer Ray Luckhurst then mixed and mastered it at Sweet Water Studio (Tel: 03 9783 4455) in Frankston. My good friend Tom Bolton designed the cover (to hear his music go to www.sensibletom.com).

Click songs to listen MP3 Samples (quality: 96kbps, sample duration varies from 1 to 2 minutes, file size: 700KB-1.5MB)

Stay In Tune (5:37) - A rock-feel with full band and lap-steel. Written after returning from overseas to find political spin in full flight, this song calls out for people to stay engaged with the machinations of the powers that be.
Toxic Waste (5:04) - This one opens with the feel of an Irish jig and moves into a shuffle. Another one with full band (me on guitars and bass, and Chris on drums). The inspiration for this came from a documentary I watched about mercury poisoning of the fishing grounds off Minamata on the Japanese island of Kyushu.
Cupid’s Arrow (4:01) - A slow minor country blues with haunting lap-steel. A look at the foolishness of a young man's heart.
Black Dog Bark (4:02) - Another bluesy number but this time with a bit more of a jazz feel to it. Black Dog here refers to what Churchill referred to as the black dog of depression.
Sliding To Your Destiny (5:37) - I wrote this after a near-miss when I lost control of my car with life threatening potential. Thankfully I came out of it without damage to myself or my car but very shaken and philosophical.
Pushing On (3:29) - This is a driving instrumental I play on steel string guitar.
Heart Attack (6:33) - Played on acoustic lap-slide guitar, I wrote this after reflecting on a good friend’s experience (thankfully he survived his ordeal).
Train Ride (5:46) - Another one on acoustic lap-slide guitar but with a country-blues feel. Born the son of a train fanatic I guess this one had to come out. It’s a positive look at riding the train to work each day, something which is easy to be negative about.
Muroran (4:28) - Muroran is a small industrial town on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where my mother in-law lives and I visit frequently. It has grown up around a steel mill that sits right in the centre of the town and belches pollution from its chimneys. I wrote this song after watching the town slowly diminishing over several consecutive visits. This is a folkie acoustic number.
Never Overlap (4:45) - A rocky number about the perils of starting a new relationship before ending the current one.
Bad News (8:11) - This is a minor blues I wrote for fun as a spoof of all those 'my babe left me' blues. This is the only track on the CD that I play lead on a standard electric guitar. I have a different arrangement for this when I do it live and solo on acoustic guitar.
I Want To Go Home (4:06) - I wrote this after being stranded in the U.S.A. following the events of September Eleven. I was in Boston at the time and was stuck there for six days unable to get home. An acoustic number with me playing acoustic lap-slide. A quiet one to finish.