Quicksand (David Bowie cover)
Hunky Dory has probably been my favorite David Bowie album for the longest time, and it contains a few of my favorite Bowie songs. But I was particularly inspired after hearing his early demo recording for the album’s song “Quicksand”, as a bonus track. Singing in a higher key, and accompanied only by his 12 string guitar, Bowie performs the song with a raw urgency and emotion that is missing from the finished album’s more subdued rendition. For me, the song expresses a fatalistic resignation, and perhaps desperation, at the same time it suggests a mysteriously occult approach to life.
This performance was recorded live using my favorite combination of 12-string acoustic/electric guitar through a Roland JC-120 amp, and was also interjected with a variety of thematic public domain footage, in the style of early MTV videos.
I’m Carrying (Paul McCartney & Wings cover)
This tune, from Wings’ London Town album, has been dismissed by some as just another of McCartney’s silly love songs, but I’ve always found its chromatic chord progression and ambiguous lyrics to be somewhat dark and mysterious.
This performance was recorded live using my 12-string acoustic/electric guitar through a Roland JC-120 amp, and was interjected with some public domain film footage, in the style of early MTV videos.
The Spirit of ’76
I created this video in November of 2008 out of footage I shot in New York (Astoria and Manhattan), though I also included a few brief public domain clips. This song is found on my album Short Flight to a Distant Star, and aspects of it were not only inspired by some particularly dark times, but also quite literally a hole in my bathroom ceiling that opened up one day, due to water damage from the apartment over mine. It has been likened to Elliott Smith, but I remember being influenced musically by an obscure song that The Beatles covered on their BBC recordings, called “I Just Don’t Understand”.
The Kiss (Judee Sill cover)
This is a video I put together for my cover of Judee Sill’s haunting song, “The Kiss”, as recorded on my Short Flight to a Distant Star album. Sill was a truly unique American singer-songwriter in the early 1970’s; her occasionally baroque-inspired music drew heavily on religious themes of devotion. For my own recording, I tried not to diverge too much from her original, beautiful arrangement.