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Songs Inspired by the 
Texas Hill Country


    This is my 15th album.
    
    When I am out gigging, people want a CD that sounds just like what they are hearing, and now I have this to offer. I can also use this CD as a demo to drop off when I am trying to find places to play. The local Texas flavor just adds to the appeal and is in keeping with my history of themed albums. 


    Now to me, solo guitar is a bit on the naked side, so I thought it needed just a little “back up.” I liked the way “Mother & Calf” turned out on the Gray Whale Migration CD, so I followed that format. I record the song on guitar and put it in the left channel. Then I play it again and put the second guitar on the right. These are two guitars playing the exact same thing. I don’t have perfect mechanical precision, so sometimes you can tell it is two distinct guitars, sometimes you can’t. This studio technique gives the sound a very nice spatial feel to it. Next I play a bass guitar that goes in the center. The bass gives the sound more grounding. More base, if you will. All of the songs on the CD follow this recipe, except the last track (“Sunset over the Hill Country”), which uses only one guitar along with bass guitar. 


    Many of the other songs have a little more embellishment, like the strum of the 12 string on “Deer in the Woods” and “Enchanted.” But I avoided lots of discernible layers in an attempt to remain at least moderately close to my pledge of maintaining the one-guitar sound. Also worth noting is that there is no lead guitar on the entire CD. 


    I also changed the way I record. My first 12 albums use acoustic guitars with a pickup (where an electronic pickup is housed in the body of the guitar and the signal is sent to the processor). On recent CDs, I started using a microphone about half the time. To make a long and technical story short, a microphone does a better job of rendering an acoustic sound. Texas Hill Country uses microphone on the guitars almost exclusively. A second enhancement to my (supposed) skills as a sound engineer have come from the use of equalization (EQ). In the past I used only simple bass, mid-range and treble controls. Now I am using computerized EQ that can boost or trim any portion of the sound spectrum with near infinite variability. To appreciate the differences of microphone and EQ, go to a quiet room and listen to the second track on the CD, “Oak.” The sound is as thick and rich as chocolate pudding. 


    Hot damn, we’ve moved to Texas! Of course I had this great thing going with a series of albums inspired by the Pacific Northwest: Salmon Run, Music for Redwoods, Aqua Terra Strata, Wild River, and Gray Whale Migration. I am a firm believer in the knack for place to flow into art. As soon as we made the decision to move to Austin, that was in November of 2014, I started hearing songs about Texas coming through the guitar. Many of the tracks on the CD were composed while we still lived in California (we didn’t actually move until September of 2015), and others were written once we landed in the Lone Star State. Confession: a few of the tracks were older pieces, and I just changed song titles to fit a Hill Country mood that they elicited. 


    The Texas Hill Country, by the way, is a region in the center of the state immediately west of Austin. Most everything to the north, south and east of here is fairly flat. There are very deep layers of limestone that were laid down when this part of Texas was covered by ocean. The waters receded and the seabed became land. Some millions of years ago the area that comprises the Hill Country was geologically uplifted, and rainfall has been working on it ever since. The rain water that runs off the land has caused erosion and lots of river and creek valleys: hills. Water percolating through the ground has formed caves, vast underground aquifers and artesian springs.


     In the world of CD manufacture, the cost of printing the cover is almost as much as having the plastic CDs burned. Those 8-panel CD covers I have been using with descriptions for all of the songs are expensive. So I decided to lower the budget on this project and went with a 2-panel cardboard sleeve. Still, I wanted to say something about each piece. 


1. San Saba Sunrise
    San Saba is a town in the center of the Hill Country that happens to make for good alliteration with the word “sunrise.”


2. Oak
    As hot and dry as it is here, I just knew that vegetation would be sparse. So when we first visited Austin, I was astounded that the natural landscape is a fairly dense oak forest. Our yard is dominated by plateau live oak and post oak. These trees are tough and tenacious, yet stately.


3. Deer in the Woods
    Our neighborhood is crawling with deer! Our street name, Shantivana, means “peaceful forest.” This is the first song I wrote after we moved here.


4. Bathed in a Summer Night
    That peaceful, dreamy feeling when you are sitting on the porch on a hot summer evening: relaxed and enveloped.


5. Enchanted
    One of the famous local geological features is a place called Enchanted Rock. It is a solid dome of granite that has been exposed by erosion. It rises 425ft and covers 640 acres. According to Indian folklore, the rock has magical and spiritual powers.


6. Leonids over Luckenbach
    It turns out that the famous town of Luckenbach, TX, is in the Hill Country, and boy, don’t the stars (and meteorites) shine bright over Texas! (Leonids is the name of a meteor shower that occurs each November.) 


7. Cretaceous Limestone
    This song is all about the ocean that used to cover the southern tier of Texas. The Cretaceous period lasted from 149 million years to 65 million years ago, and that is when the limestone here was formed. Marine critters decomposed and calcified into this most wonderful rock as layer upon layer of sea shells and sediment sank to the bottom. In some places the limestone underground is 50 thousand feet thick.


8. Cave
    Even when there isn’t air pollution, rain becomes slightly acidic as it falls through the atmosphere. This weak carbonic acid slowly eats through the limestone as it percolates through the ground. Small cracks can grow to become fissures, holes, tunnels, and ultimately caves. Places of wonder.


9. Parched Texas Tundra
    The dirt here is a clay. Baked under the summer sun, the lawn goes brown and charred. The soil gets nearly rock hard and cracks: “Texas Tundra.”


10. Aquifer
    The surface can be hot, dry, and crusty, but below is a dynamic drip and flow of cool, life-giving water. 


11. Jacob’s Well
    There is a spring not far from our home called Jacob’s well. Its flow rate is about 170 gallons per minute, and it forms the head waters of Cypress Creek. The “entrance” (“exit” would be more accurate) to the artesian well is a hole in the creek bed, maybe 12ft wide. Divers have traced the underwater cave back almost a mile. Geologists have determined that the water issuing forth is rain that fell about 2000 years ago. It has taken this long for it to find its way through the aquifer and back out again.


12. Flash Flood
    Clay soil + limestone substrate + hills + occasional downpours = flash flood country. This song was written on the morning of a rain event in which we received 6+ inches in 8 hours. The afore-mentioned Cypress Creek rose from a trickle to a 16ft torrent overnight. 


13. Ranch Road
    According to Wikipedia, a “ranch-to-market road (sometimes farm road or ranch road for short) is a state road or county road that connects rural or agricultural areas to market towns.” So here’s to driving with the top down through the Hill Country. 


14. March of the 9 Banded Armadillo
    My first idea for a Texas CD theme was armadillos. So I read a book about them. Let’s just say there wasn’t quite enough material there. Did you know that all 9 banded armadillo litters are sets of identical quadruplets? Or that it was humans who first transmitted leprosy to armadillos, and not the other way around?


15. Cows Come Home
    There is something peaceful and relaxing about the slow plod of bovines returning home to the barn at the end of the day.


16. Sweet Dreams, Cowboy
    Even the roughest and toughest will nod their head and sleep like a baby. 


17. Sunset over the Hill Country
    The night before we left Crescent City, all packed up and waiting on the moving van the next day, this was the last song I wrote in California and originally titled it “Leaving California.” It was going to be the first song on the CD, based on the chronology of how we experienced everything. But then I thought anyone who purchased the CD here in Texas wouldn’t understand. So I exercised artistic prerogative and used the poignance of the song to describe the sunset as it draws the curtains closed on this beautiful Hill Country.

Each song on the album describes a different stage of the salmon's epic journey upstream. The CD cover has liner notes that include a paragraph for each song that gives the natural history of the salmon. Here are the liner notes:

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​I love salmon. I see so many images. Single words queue entire stories in my mind: wild, totem, heroic, sustenance, powerful, continuum, miraculous, keystone, tireless, beautiful. There is the biologic and the scientific, but here I offer songs that are more like the romantic, taken mostly from the perspective of the salmon, a narrative stronger than words.


Salmon Run


1.  The Kelp Forest


Relatively little is known about the lives of salmon at sea where, depending on the species, they will have spent one to five years. The salmon from different river systems intermingle, sometimes traveling thousands of miles in the open ocean, fattening themselves up before converging once again at the mouths of the rivers from which they came. They may wait for weeks at the mouth, until fall rains come and instinct tells them it is time to return.


2.  That Click You Hear When the Two Ends of the Cycle of Life Finally Meet


And so the salmon begin their charge upstream. Of the millions of species of fish that inhabit the earth's waters, only a handful are anadromous, leaving fresh water for the salty sea in their youth. Their bodies mysteriously adapt to the abrupt change in salinity. When they return to those inland streams to breed, they stop eating. Their bodies begin a slow decay and actually morph as teeth are exposed, noses become hooked, coloration changes, and humps may form. The river becomes charged with their energy.


3.  Procession


The salmon's upstream march continues. Before European contact, rivers would roil with their return. There are tales of horses balking at stepping foot in rivers so teeming with huge runs of fish. As they swim on, they burn their fat reserves from a life at sea.  One salmon migration on the Yukon River stretches over 3200 miles, while the trek to Idaho's Snake River has a gain in elevation of over one mile.


4.  Old Growth


A salmon stronghold represents a watershed supported by an entire ecosystem. And a healthy stream begins with a healthy forest.  As rainfall and snowmelt trickle into rivulets, creeks and streams, it is the tall trees that secure the soil, provide shade to cool the water and support lush undergrowth that keeps the streams  clear and free of sediment. Here, then,  is a celebration of the virgin forest.


5.  Hell's Gate


The classic image of salmon determination is seeing muscular bodies wiggle through the air as they leap up waterfalls. Rapids, rocks, turbulence. . . The banks of rivers may narrow  and cause a forceful current,  sometimes dubbed "hell's gate."  Many will perish in the attempt, but the strength of all those who pass the gauntlet has been infused into the species for millions of years..


6.  Pisces at Night


To aboriginal man, the salmon were larger than life. Since time immemorial salmon had been making their inland runs of bounty. As a keystone species, their bodies provided nourishment for all manner of birds, mammals, insects and other fish. Even the trees of the forest eventually benefited from the nutrients brought from the sea in a grand food chain.  In myth and legend man cast salmon into the sky, swimming through the Milky Way. 


7.  Of Silt & Algae


Industrial logging practices like clear cutting and road building cause sediment to run off the hillsides into the river. This silt clogs the pebble riverbeds in which salmon would otherwise lay their eggs. Dams are insurmountable barriers to upstream migration.  The lakes created behind dams raise water temperatures above levels salmon can tolerate. They also cause toxic algae blooms. Sadly, the fish often find themselves at such a dead end in a valiant but hopeless attempt to continue. Because of this, in a little more than a century, salmon populations have been drastically reduced and have even disappeared from many river systems.


8.  Natal Stream


Salmon spawning does not generally occur in the main stream of a river, with its larger boulders and rocks and its strong current. They lay their eggs in the smaller streams and rivulets that feed the river. The miracle of salmon migration culminates as they finally reach their childhood stomping grounds. There is love in the water.


9.  Working Her Tail Off


Salmon must endure a long, slow death. From the time they enter fresh water they  begin to decay. This is particularly evident in the females. Just before spawning, she digs a nest or "redd" in the gravel bed of the stream. She does this by turning on her side and thrashing to create a depression. Her tail may appear white because the skin has literally been worn off, perhaps even revealing her bones. This is the final preparation for spawning, and it is a time of great anticipation.


10.  Quivering Silver


The male and female will finally pair off and hover above the redd. They both hold their mouths open to steady themselves in the current. He will wiggle and while she deposits eggs, he will be slightly upstream and release the milt that will fertilize them. This is the kind of sterile description that might be found in a biology text.  The romantic, on the other hand, would say that their mouths are agape in ecstasy as he quivers to excite his lover.


11.  Spawned Out


There is still some tidying to do. The redd will be covered loosely with gravel to protect the eggs, and the salmon may guard the redd from predators in what days or hours remain of their lives. But they are now relieved of their earthly burden---Mission:  Accomplished! 


12.  And the Weary Now Shall Rest


The salmon's body drifts listlessly in the water. This conjures up the rather inglorious image of salmon on the rocky shore, jaws gasping desperately for life. But just think of the serenity they must feel, knowing they have succeeded.  What a satisfying and dignified death.


13.  River Phoenix


The incubation period for the eggs will vary from weeks to months, depending on species, water temperature and oxygen content, and probably a hundred other factors. The alevin will emerge with egg sack still attached. They are a new generation of orphans, genetically programmed to make the epic journey out to sea and back. The torch is now theirs to carry.