Better Than This
Piano-based rock and roll with many of my favorite songs to date. Attitude rockers like "File it Away" and "Balance Beam" are balanced nicely with songs about marriage and parenthood. I began recording BETTER THAN THIS in the summer of 1999 at my old home in Pennsylvania. It was completed by year's end, and mixing and mastering were completed in January of 2000.
This was the first recording that I completed in my own home. Thanks to new technology, the ability to record on a computer had become increasingly affordable and obtainable for the common person. Drums and keyboards were sequenced onto the computer. Bass, guitar, vocals and horns were recorded through a soundcard, using sequencing/audio software to synch the audio with the previously sequenced tracks.
Most of the songs on this album were composed between 1998-1999. "Head Start" was the most recent song, completed in September, 1999 while I was knee-deep in the recording process. "Feeling Single Again," "The One That Got Away," and "You Bug Me" were completed shortly before recording began. Other songs literally took years to write, most notably "Balance Beam," a composition that took four years to evolve from its origins to its completed form.
The title of the album, BETTER THAN THIS, actually originated in a song called "The Diary You Keep," a composition that I simply couldn't get to sound the way I wanted, so it didn't make the final cut (I tried to record it for THE DRAGON BREATHES ON BLEECKER STREET, but it still didn't work out).
Click here for music and lyrics.