Well, Looking Glass is finally "on the shelves", so I thought it would be a good time to explain how this happened. Which involves a little bit of personal history.
For some reason, it seems as though I've been groping for a musical identity my entire career. When I started out, I had read a lot about Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac, and I had this unstoppable wanderlust. I wanted to write songs about this kind of personal spiritual journey and sing them in cafeterias all over the country. So I did. It was cool, but I was young, undisciplined, and broke.
After studying jazz guitar in LA, then moving to NYC in the 80s, I decided I needed to combine R&B pop songwriting with kick-ass lead guitar playing - maybe I thought I was going to be the white Prince or something, I don't know. It mutated into synth-heavy new wave dance pop with socially conscious lyrics about government corruption and warmongering. Oddly enough, it didn't become wildly popular in the Reagan years.
In the 90s, it seemed to me that music was starting to get segregated into these little cliques, where the only people you thought knew what good music was all about were those that shared your own opinions. In this spirit, I felt like it was time to channel my muse into emulating some of my musical heroes like the Beatles, XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, and others. The result was Stone Tablet, a collection of crude recordings (the name was no accident), but nonetheless my best attempt at this kind of pop songwriting.
All along, I was periodically writing these quiet, reflective songs, some of them just instrumentals, which I sort of kept hidden away because it didn't fit the image that I had created in my own mind about myself as an artist. The only person who heard these songs was my wife, who at some point finally said "Look - you have no idea, but this is your best material. It's the 'real you' in musical form. You need to get these out."
I don't know if I ever bought the 'real you' part (I've still got a lot of other 'me's' floating around), but I felt like she was on to something. If you buy the CD and read the liner notes, you'll see that some of these songs go back to 1979. One of them I literally found on an old cassette that managed to survive from 1982, and I had completely forgotten about it. Some of the more recent ones probably would have made it on to the next album, but they seemed to fit with the general tone of this collection, so they got included.
So what I landed with is a sort of catharsis that allowed me to get caught up with some thoughts and emotions that built up over the years. It wasn't what I had planned to do next for a musical project, but to repeat one of my favorite John Lennon lyrics, "life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".