This years album, A Country Christmas, is finally available after some initial trials and tribulations. I had published this album in October, with a November 28th release date, to make sure it would get into the Apple and Spotify catalogs in time for Christmas. Sadly, when you pre-release like this you do NOT get the opportunity to see the finished product before the go-live date.
When I signed into Musixmatch to create the word-by-word lyric sync, I discovered that track 11 had a bad audio file. Strangely, on a multi-track album, they do not offer the ability to “fix” a single track. The only alternative was to do a “take down” of the entire album, essentially unpublishing it from all the various services, then resubmit the album from scratch with the bad track 11 corrected. This added significant delay and cause some very strange issues on Apply Music/iTunes. Spotify republished the album without issue, but Apple failed to publish track 5 and track 6, giving an error saying the the audio “wasn’t available in my region”; it took another couple days to get this resolved so that all 14 tracks were properly available and streamable/downloadable on Apple.
It all eventually turned out OK but the delays cost me over two weeks of the album release not being available for streaming or purchase.
Everything is now finally fixed, and the album is again available on Apple Music, and Spotify as well as YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and other other major streaming services.
I hope you all enjoy this years album and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Well, September is knocking on the door, so it’s time for a new song for fall. I was driving down the road from the lake into town and noticed a couple of the trees had already started turning small amounts of their leaves to gold and rust-red colours.
Outside my side window in my living room, the acorns have been dropping like crazy from my trees and the squirrels are going nuts (no pun intended) collecting the acorns from the ground and running around stashing them under leaves and sticks in the back yard.
Of course, the back-to-school crowds are packing the stores and we’re seeing school buses setting up their routes for the new school year.
All of this inspired me to create “Coming of the Fall”
The track has been submitted for publishing, so it should appear on all the usual streaming platforms sometime next week: Apple iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and the more obscure streaming services around the world like Pandora, Deezer, TIDAL, and Napster.
The availability may be slighly delayed by the holiday on Monday since all new works have to be screened by TuneCore before they will be released to the streaming services, but hopefully it will be up soon.
I took some extra effort on this release to make a really, really custom lyric video instead of the standard looping video. This video is available now on my YouTube channel
I’ve got a friend who is married with two children, bought a new house not that long ago with a pool for the family to enjoy, and seemed to be on the road to family bliss. The he got whalloped with a huge project at work and started having to work from the very early hours in the AM to very late at night, seven days a week, and I started thinking about how this impacts someone with kids that are into afterschool and weekend activities.
I’m not much better with managing work-life balance with a horrible work-a-holic streak, but I don’t have the added complications of a family to have to juggle. It did get me thinking about all the things we miss in life if we’re constantly slaves to our jobs, watching the seasons slip by each year without taking the time to just stand back and enjoy lifes little moments. Things like taking a day-trip in the car to visit a fair, farmers market, or flea market that’s an hour or two away… something I used to do in years gone past.
This song is a rallying cry to all of us who aren’t taking the time to enjoy lifes journey to try an inspire us all, me included, to taking the time to savour lifes little moments before they’ve passed us by. I hope that if you are like me and my friend and struggling with finding balance in your life that you take the lyrics of this song to heart and find just a little time each week to Enjoy Life’s Journey.
So, it’s been a challenging winter and spring season. This has been one of the worst winters on record here for extreme snowfall amounts, and living on a rural private road as I do makes getting around in bad weather a challenge. For those who listened to 8 Hours in the E.R. you’ll know that I trashed my knee in a freak accident and the recovery has been slow. Combine that with nearly waist deep snow at times and the limits on my mobility really stack up.
I was so excited when the weather finally improved in the late spring that I would be able to go visit my family for a long weekend. I took a trip down to see them and that seemed to start my Run of Bad Luck.
While parked on the roadside in a marked parking spot, a crazy driver weaving down the road at high speed swerved off the road, crossed a bicycle lane, and side swiped my pickup truck. Of course, he didn’t stop and took off down the roadway and disappeared after weaving around a half dozen other cars. My dashcam decided that this will the ideal time to suffer memory card corruption, so even the off chance of my getting their license plate wasn’t to happen. The vehicle was deemed “unsafe to drive” so I got stuck at my relatives for two weeks instead of just a few days. After paying $1,000 to the insurance company, since I didn’t have a license plate for the hit-and-run driver, and to add insult to injury, fresh food in my fridge was wasted by the time I got home due to the extended unplanned stay.
Finally home and settling down to recover from the unpleasant experience, my area got hit with one of the 100-year storms. A million people without power, massive damage to infrastructure from fallen trees, and so forth. The second day into the outages my backup generator quit and wouldn’t start, leaving me scrambling to rewire some battery backup solution to keep my newly replaced fridge contents from going bad again. This continued for nearly two weeks, with having to run daily to the nearest town with power to recharge my battery pack to get through 24 hours. When all that was over, the arborist quote for dealing with all the shattered and partially fallen trees on my property nicked me for another $1,200
I’m really beginning, at this point, to think I must have done something really bad in a past-life to have this kind of bad luck… but Mr. Murphy wasn’t done with me yet. Never tempt fate by saying things like “…it can’t get any worse…”
Two weeks later another massive storm hit, this time torrential rainfall. So much water hit my property that it soaked through to the septic and raised the water level in my septic tank to the point that sewage started to back up into the basement. I took a while to notice that anything was going wrong down there, and by the time the smell worked its way upstairs to an intensity that clearly something was wrong the basement was partially flooded with sewage. Had it just been rain or surface water flooding the basement it would have been easier to deal with, but sewage contamination means that nearly anything touched becomes “non-recoverable”. The basement flooring, bottom three feet of wall, furnace, bathroom fixtures, and many boxes of stuff I had stored down there on the floor have all had to be scrapped.
Someone hit me up with the quote “If it weren’t for bad luck, you wouldn’t have any” and this inspired this little song. A lot of effort went into getting the fiddle work just right, so I hope everyone enjoys this song.
The single, Run of Bad Luck, has been submitted to Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and all the other usual streaming services.
Enjoy this little clip while we wait for the full song to be available for streaming…
I’m one of the many people who follow the webcam of Friends of Big Bear Valley. FOBBV has two live cameras that watch a mated pair of American Bald Eagles named Jackie and Shadow.
For the last two seasons, Jackie and Shadow have had a hard time and the eggs that Jackie laid each year never managed to hatch.
Last year I created a song called Jackie and Shadow about these two majestic birds in support of FOBBV that stirred the emotions of many fans of the eagles. I promised the community that if Jackie and Shadow had success this year that I would make a replacement song and video.
This year, as in the last, Jackie laid three eggs. Thankfully, the weather proved mild enough that two of the eggs hatched almost on the same day, but the third egg wasn’t showing any signs of hatching. I immediately set out to write a new song and video called Eggs to Eaglets and rushed to post it on YouTube with lyrics about the two chicks and an egg.
Well, egg #3 proved to be just a little late and a few days after its siblings hatched, chick #3 managed to break out of its egg and join the nest. Of course, this means that my original song version about two chicks and an egg were now useless. So, back to the drawing board and I made some strategic changes to the song so that it now reflected the current state of affairs. The replacement Eggs to Eaglets was posted to YouTube a couple days after the original.
I hope everyone enjoys watching Jackie and Shadow as much as my family does, and that everyone takes time to support Friends of Big Bear Valley in keeping up their fantastic work.
I realized that a lot of the songs that I’ve been creating are seasonally or event themed (i.e. Fall, Winter, Thanksgiving, Valentines, etc…) which severely limits the playability of these song year round. So, I got to thinking about making a more generic country song.
Someone once told me that the quintessential Country and Western song was “My girl left me, my truck broke, and my dog died” I figured I’d see if I could make myself a classic country tune, in the style of ole’ time country, called “Country Blues” and yes in the song the girl leaves, the truck breaks, and the dog runs away.
Having made Country Blues, I got thinking that it really wasn’t fair leaving our cowboy all emotionally torn up like that, so I made a second tune in more modern country shuffle style called “No More Country Blues” where our cowboy finds his dog and a new cowgirl to keep him company.
I combined these songs into a two-song album called Country Blues Suite now available on all the streaming sites including iTunes/Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, etc…
There was just enough time before Valentine’s Day 2025 to get one more song completed and mastered. Valentine Blues is about a country fella who has his heart broken when his girl runs off to the big city with a rich guy.
I’ve started a project to remaster a bunch of older songs and update the distributed audio files. I’m also taking the opportunity to leverage Capify to create lyric videos for YouTube for the remastered songs.
I will be updating this blog post as new songs get remastered and posted, but here is the initial list
Be My Valentine is from 2024, one of two songs created for Valentine’s Day that year (the other song is Disco style).
This tells the story of a fella who has decided to pop the question on Valentine’s Day
Tax Man Blues is a tune for tax season, all about the ridiculous amount of money that we all seem to have to pay to the government for taxes. This was one of the most popular songs of 2024 despite being released near the end of tax season.
My 2025 song for Valentine’s Day is a little country shuffle tune called Country Valentine.
Light and cheery, this song is perfect for a cuddle in front of the fire, particularly given the crazy cold weather we’ve been experiencing so far this year. The song is online and streaming on Apple Music and Spotify, and should be appearing shortly on all the other streaming services (YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc…)
A little tune, January’s Bitter Chill, is now online on the major streaming services to accompany the Polar Vortex that’s brought ridiculously cold weather this month.
This song was written when it was -27 degrees C (-17 degrees F) and you couldn’t go outside with any skin exposed for any length of time. While struggling through the blowing snow and the incredible wind chill the phrase “it’s cold enough to stop your heart” popped into my head. This eventually translated to the line in the chorus “Takes a heart, and makes it still” when I had to find some way to rhyme “chill”
For those of you who are experiencing this crazy cold weather, curl up with a nice hot drink and enjoy. If you detest the cold weather, you might like to also listen to “Snow is a Four Letter Word” while sipping.
January’s Bitter Chill is online on Apple Music and Spotify and should be up on all the other major streaming services (YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, etc…) shortly if it’s not already available there.
