For me, the creative process is mostly trial and error. I noodle around on the fret board, and voila, a pleasant sound issues forth. Sometimes I am actively looking for a chord, other times it is pure chance, and often it is actually a miscalculation. Carefree Bob Ross, who hosted The Joy of Painting, referred to this as “happy little mistakes.” As random as that might sound, I seem to be pretty good at it.


To take the happenstance a step further, I can tell you that I don’t feel a mood, then write music to emote it. I am not that good. Instead, I stumble upon a melody, then decide what it sounds like. But I believe that a sense of time and place are embedded into art. While I was on vacation in The Rockies I wrote some songs that sounded like, well, The Rockies. Listening to the music I hear log cabins and meadows and rabbit prints in the snow. (I have enough material to record a “mountain” themed album.)


I do, however, have some means I use to help steer the music in the right direction. I use several different open tunings for guitar.  In “standard” tuning, the notes of the 6 strings are EBGDAE. When you strum the 6 strings it just sounds like a bunch of arbitrary notes. In my favorite open tuning, DAF#DAD, the 2 Es are tuned down a whole step to Ds, and the G goes down to an F#. This, when strummed, yields a beautiful D chord. And this chord has a mood: it is deep, rich and organic. It was the primary tuning I used for the compositions on my CD Music for Redwoods. 


For years and years I had what I called “the matrix” in my mind. I would find a melody, then develop it as it was repeated.  Over the course of time, an idea might coalesce into a complete song. This could take an hour, several days, or even months.


Musical ideas are fleeting! Sometimes you can come across the most beautiful progression, and unless you stop what you are doing and play it over and over to burn it into your memory, it flies off into the ether, never to be heard again. So now I use a hand held voice recorder. When I am experimenting and a “nice one” appears, I immediately record it as a snippet. As I compose a song, I go back and forth between being live on the guitar and the recorded snippets. I maintain a library of snippets on the computer. So even if I don’t develop the idea into a viable song today, I have a vault of hundreds potential tunes in storage. 


The initial idea, the musical phrase you discover, may turn out to be the heart of the song. Perhaps later you compose an intro. Sometimes you never find an ending.   

Salt Air
        Gray whales, Eschrictius robustus, spend nearly all of their time within 12km of the     shoreline, so they are one of the  most commonly viewed whales by humans. They are     medium-sized whales. Females may grow to be 25-30,000kg and 15m in length (add 5000kg if     the female is pregnant). Males are a bit smaller at 20,000kg and 13m long. Despite that bulk,     we rarely see more of them than the vapor of their spouts at the surface. They empty their     lungs of 600 liters of air and grab another breath in 2 seconds. 
    
Arctic
        From June through October Grays are in the Bering Sea, feeding around the     clock. Grays are baleen whales, or mysticetes. Instead of teeth they have a row of baleen on     each side of the mouth that is fibrous tissue and acts as a filter for feeding. “Mysticete” comes     from the Greek word for “mustache.” The baleen resembles a mustache when the whales     mouth is agape. Amphipods, tube worms and other tiny invertebrates thrive on the seafloor     which is rich in nutrients and stoked by arctic summer sunlight. Grays dive to the bottom (no     more than 70m deep) and     suck up a mouthful of prey and mud. They use their tongue to press     the water and mud through the baleen, leaving the food items to be swallowed. During their 5     month feast an adult may consume 60 tonnes seafood and have a weight gain of some     3000-6000 kg.


Southbound
        Gray whales don’t all migrate at once. The first group to go south are the pregnant      females, starting in mid-October. The males and other females join in around mid-November.     Even then, they don’t really travel in distinct social groups. They are solitary. It is more like a     bunch of individual whales that happened to be traveling along the same route to the same     place. Grays swim virtually non-stop at 7km/hr for 2 months straight to cover the 10,000km     trip south. When sleeping they rest one hemisphere of the brain at a time. In this way they are     able to swim (and breathe) during sleep. They burn about 23kg of fat stores per day. Put     another way, they get about 16 miles per gallon of fat (a tractor-trailer rig gets about 8mpg).     


Whale Mate
        Half of the females trekking to Baja are in the late stages of pregnancy, the other half     are going there to mate. The females are promiscuous and will mate with more than one     partner. Grays can mate one on one, or sometimes they mate in groups of 10 or more. If you     can imagine the thrashing of beasts this size you will understand why no one has gotten close     enough to study it in detail.


Weightless
        The whales rest in and near the lagoons of Baja California for a month, new mothers     for about 3 months. So why migrate? First, the water temps in the Arctic are near freezing,     compared to about 20degrees in the lagoons. Their body temp is 38degrees (37degrees for     humans). The newborn calves need the warmth because their blubber and fat stores are not     fully developed. Second, as the arctic sun sets in the winter, so does the food supply. Even     with blubber, it costs a lot of energy for a mammal to maintain body temperature in those     waters. A whale actually expends less energy swimming slowly south and back than it would if     it stayed in the icy Bering Sea. Grays are neutrally buoyant and can just hang in the lagoons     with little effort.


Mother & Calf
        After a pregnancy of 13 months, the newborn gray whale calf is 4.7m long and weighs     1100kg. They are completely dependent on their moms. For the first several weeks the pair     stays in the inner lagoon. As the calf gets more comfortable swimming it will spy hop and     breach, and the pair will move nearer to the lagoon entrance and make forays outside the     lagoon. Mother and calf pairs will also congregate, perhaps like human mothers taking their     kids to the park for a playdate, much to the delight of whale watchers lucky enough to     witness this from a boat. Grays have become famous for friendly interactions with humans,     especially in the lagoons. To nurse, the calf does not suck, instead the mother squirts the     incredibly fat-rich milk from a teat into the calves mouth. The calf will triple its weight to about     3300kg during its 2 month stay. That is a gain of 1.5kg per hour. 


Northbound
        The grays head back north in 2 separate pulses. The males and newly impregnated     females leave first, around mid-February (in fact, some of the whales start the return trip back     before they even reach Baja). New moms need to wait until the calf is fit enough to make the     journey, somewhere around mid-April. It has now been 6 months since the mother has eaten,     and it will still be nursing its calf, all while swimming another 10,000km north. Females are     larger than males because of the extra fat reserves they need for this incredible feat.


Chase
        Orcas are beautiful creatures in their own right, but Bigg’s killer whales are amongst the     only natural predators of gray whales. They are pack hunters that attack the vulnerable calves,     especially near Monterey, CA were the shallow waters of the offshore continental shelf give     way to deep submarine canyons. The killers bite the calf or give it body slams, but mostly they     try to drown the calf by riding up on it. In defense, the mother will try to move to shallow     water or swim underneath its baby and support it out of the killer’s reach. Mortality from     killer whales can be as high as 35% of the calves.


Unimak Pass
        This is the last leg of the 20,000km adventure, the longest migration of any mammalian     population. Unimak Pass is the first gap between the Alaskan peninsula and the chain of     Aleutian Islands, making it the gateway to the Bering Sea. It is a pinch point through which all     of the grays will pass, and another place on the route where Bigg’s killer whales lie in waiting.     It is a time of danger, but also of great anticipation. 


Delisted
        The whaling industry completely wiped out gray whales from the Atlantic Ocean by the     late 1700s. When whaling began along the west coast of North America in the 1800s, the     population is believed to have been around 25,000. By 1900 there might have been as     few as 800 surviving. Grays were given international protection in 1946. Their numbers     increased to 11,000 by 1967, 17,000 by 1980 and 20,000 by 2000. A rare success story, in      1994 the gray whale population of the Eastern Pacific Ocean was delisted as an endangered     species.


Breaching
        Breaching is one of those great spectacles of nature when a whale jumps out of water     and lands on its side with a great splash. It is mostly youngsters that engage in this activity.     They do it just for fun!


Song of the Gray Whale
         Grays don’t “sing” in the way we typically think of whale songs.Their vocalizations are     mostly pops, clicks, grunts and moans. Gray whales share a     common ancestor with hippos. 54     million years ago this 4 legged terrestrial mammal about the size of a kitty cat dipped its toes in     the ocean and eventually decided to stay.  To this day, rising above the din of millennia,     epochs, even whole geologic eras of evolution, you can hear the song of the gray whale.

Northern Spotted Owl
    To breed, Northern Spotted Owls require cavities or platforms like those found in large old-growth trees, and they do not tolerate habitat disturbance. When they gained protection under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, it forever changed the battle groud to save the last tracts of old-growth redwood forest that were not held in public trust. They are a fitting emblem of this realm: cool, dark, lush, and mysterious.


Sequoia Sempervirens
    Coast redwoods are the tallest organisms on Earth, and among the oldest (one tree was recently determined to be 2520 years old). It is also the largest species of tree; there are historic records of coast redwood trees that were larger than even the sequoiadendron giganteum of the Sierra Nevada. Their range once covered much of the northern hemisphere but is limited now to a strip of coastal land that runs from the southern border of Oregon to Big Sur, California.


Valley of the Lost Groves
    “The Valley of the Lost Groves” is home to some of the largest redwood titans. Douglas Fir, Sitka Spruce, and Western Hemlock also grow to enormous proportions, draped with moss and lichens, and armored by gnarled bark. Hiking through this terrain is like being in an exotic land on expedition.


Fog
    The coast of Northern California is wet enough in the winter, but almost no rain falls during summer and early fall. It is the blanket of fog drifting in on cool air off the Pacific Ocean that bridges the moisture gap and supplies the trees with one-fourth to one-half of their annual uptake of water. 


Sapling
    A mature redwood can survive almost any attack from insects, disease, or fire, but they are quite vulnerable as saplings. In the southern reaches of the redwood range, most young sprouts are actually clones from the roots or burl of a parent tree. Farther north, where there is less fire recurrence, most sprout from tiny seeds. A young tree may spend decades languishing in the understory, waiting for its opportunity when a giant may fall and open a hole in the canopy. 


Follow Me Up
    How our eyes are drawn up when in this forest.


A Thousand Rainy Seasons
    Redwoods thrive in this temperate rain forest, with rainfall sometimes exceeding 100 inches per year. A winter storm can last for a week, pelting the landscape with sideways rain. Being toppled by the wind is one of the few serious threats to a mature redwood. 


Grove
    One way redwoods survive wind throw is by growing close to each other in groves. Their roots are surprisingly shallow, only about ten feet deep or so, with no tap root. But the roots of neighboring trees are intertwined and anchor each other against the wind.


Forest Phoenix
    Old-growth forest is all about a continuous cycle of life rising from death. An acre of primeval redwood contains more biomass than any other ecosystem on Earth. Shortly after the gold rush in California came the start of logging, and all things redwood stayed on the decline for 150 years. But thanks to the efforts of many to preserve old-growth and second-growth habitat we are for the first time seeing a turnaround to that trend.


Trillium
    Plants of the understory must be able to survive in very low light. The flowers of the redwood forest are subtle: Fairy Bells, Bleeding Hearts, Rhododendron, Columbia Lily. . .and Trillium.


Fire!
    Fire can have a major impact on an ecosystem, and redwoods have adapted to survive. The bark of a coast redwood can be a foot thick and is full of water. Redwood sap is not as resinous as that of most other conifers, so it is less flammable. The crown of a redwood is protected by its sheer height. Evidence of past fires can be seen in the form of bark that has been scorched black. “Goose pens” are caves that have been burned into the base of redwood trunks (often large enough to walk in).


Avenue of the Giants
    Driving with the top down, redwoods style.


Luna
    One person can make a difference. Once upon a time a girl famously climbed into a tree named Luna and stayed there in protest for over two years to help protect the Headwaters Forest. We all have skills we can use to advocate for the redwoods, whether that is volunteering, supporting environmental organizations, grass roots efforts, or even making music. Perhaps in the future we will think less about dollars and more about sense.
    










    
    
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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.