“Spiritual #1” was written about an escalator at the 16th Street/Mission BART station that always had a pile of some unknown substance gurgling at the bottom landing. Beware the “Slide of filth.”

“Troubled Times” was written for Johnny Cash to sing. It is a partially true tale, like so many good ones. It features the existential question "Who first coined the phrase good grief? Such a phrase is beyond belief...."

“Tremblin’ Earth” was inspired by a early morning earthquake that set off my stereo and caused me to fell my trembling abode. It was very biblical, lamentation, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and Mingus’ “Blues and Roots” spilling out…

My friend Craig Bourne wrote the line "Too much crying too much thinking, not enough laughing not enough drinking" and it flipped a switch and the rest of the song emerged a few days later.

“Me and My Pieces” is another BART song. I rode BART to work for about seven years.

Evan Williams is whiskey (a knock-off of Jack Daniels from Kentucky” while John Curtis is neither a whiskey or a knock-off, although you could use the same preposition in his epithet.

"There are a series of Wayne's chronicled in this song. The Wayne's in question, Von Der Mehden, Slate, and Hussey, have most assuredly never shared the same room simultaneously. However, it gives me great comfort that I have created a space for…

I wrote this song a long time before I ever wrote it down: it lived in my head for nearly a decade before I recorded it in 2002. I am happy to dust it off and let it breathe again. I hope you enjoy.

A tasty little ramekin full of denial served about 10 years before its time. Sometimes you write them, record them, discard them, and then trip over them while living them years later. Tongue-in-cheek when it was written, cruel and cold when it…

"'Smoke Signals' is for Chef Chris Bianco and it contains many sentiments that he shared with me on the Don Bolles trip to Phoenix. It contains a great deal of wisdom and abstract truth which is what most of my communication with Chris is like…

I wrote this on the shores of a lake in Redwood City.

I wrote this on a Greyhound Bus.

"I got really into Lightning Hopkins in 2001. I used to listen to him when I was bottling olive in the early days at Pacific Sun Olive Oil. I wrote a bunch of songs in my head while I was bottling and labeling and dipping the bottles in the wax…

Brian wrote this song while walking in San Francisco in 1999, three years before his Hank Williams' year (29th year). "I was trying to convey how I was feeling at the time and I had the realization that Hank might have thought the same thing right…

There are many different kinds of bread....

"This one came from a conversation I overheard on the 15 Third bus on the way to work one morning. A guy was talking about how he DUI'd in his brand new Mustang and how everything went down hill from there. Later that week, I saw him preaching…

"In 1992, I had my head cracked open by a guy with brass knuckles on Payne's Creek Road in Red Bluff, California. I believe his name was Mickey Cortez and he was with a guy named Jason Berg and a few other guys. I was very nearly killed and I…

"Perhaps the greatest Walt Whitman/Englebert Humperdinck-influenced hymn of denial I have ever heard. I wrote it just for that reason, here is a guy, or gal, saying that every unacceptable thing they ever did was for their girlfriend/boyfriend…

The Dean of Rhythm, Brother Kevin John Kenny, has been a long-time advocate of this song that chronicles what was going on in the world of San Francsco mixed-use commercial-residential zoned building in the late 1990s.

A further elaboration of Nick Ciampi's classic tune "Coke Valley." Features references to a classic Ned Beaty movie that has caused generations of young men to pucker any time they hear the work "SQUEEL" or the phrase "purty mouth."