it's HTP's first album! recorded, mixed & produced by rich pierceall of e street studios, moss beach, CA. liner notes below & tunes also available on all major streaming platforms. follow us on the highway! cover photo: thailand, 2003.
LINER NOTES
talk of the town
once upon a time in college i took acting 101. there was a guy in my class who was always wearing one of two things: a ROTC uniform or a pair of overalls and a straw hat. he was from mississippi, and he had his life totally planned out: school, air force, dad’s law office. but man, he really did love that acting class - and he was good at it, too. we weren’t close, but he was memorable. one day last year he found his way into one of my thought bubbles - did everything turn out as planned? - and that bubble burst into a song.
i’m yours
in its earliest and failure-to-launch form, this tune told a tale of wanting.
many years later - lucky me, lucky tune - it turned into a story about having.
barn cat
huge gratitude to the slack tide currents for joining me on this one. as the guys can attest to, the cat is real. also the hill side, the loosely counted cows, the BBQ spot. as for the rest of it… just smile and nod :0).
god
i push the envelope sometimes. and - subsequently - sometimes I look up at the sky. knock knock…
ps. that synthesizer sound in the last ten seconds or so? it’s the yamaha keyboard that i have had since high school. very tickled - strangely moved, also - that it gets to play a teensy role. past meets present, circle of life, all those types of things.
big wheel
the anthropologist in me loves to people-watch. the writer in me loves to make stuff up.
this song splits that difference.
demo tape
with infinitesimal poetic license taken, this is a play by play - circa 1998 - of my very first band’s first and only three gigs. mandy hu, the bassist from that band, drop-kicked me over the moon with a “yes” when i asked if she’d play on this track, which also features the incredible jenny sparks on drums. fun fact: i’m playing a telly! it was hanging on the studio wall behind me as rich and i tried to figure out how to best dial in the guitar sound for this song. turns out all we had to do was switch the axe.
black lagoon
i studied creative writing in oklahoma city, and one summer during a residency took a little field trip downtown to an extensive chihuly glass-blowing exhibit: otherworldly, trippy, stunning. the poem practically wrote itself, but what became clear over a decade later
was that this poem was not only not done, it was also destined to be a song…
and that song was destined to feature the magic of david gilmour.
***
to all who made this album possible & to all who give it a listen:
thank you. i really am living the dream.
