In January of 2009, I recorded six new songs, giving them the title "New Year Demos," for lack of a better working title. I was excited about these songs and recorded them all at once. I had been living back in New York City for 8 or 9 months, and was eager to get into some new things, musically. In many ways, these songs represented a synthesis of an acoustic style I had been working on for several years.

One artist I was getting into at the time was the John Butler Trio. If you've never heard of them, they are pretty amazing, especially live. Butler is an Australian guitarist who started out busking in the markets of Perth. He used a 12-string guitar (minus one string) through a Marshall amplifier with a variety of effects. I liked how he retained the dynamics and percussiveness of an acoustic instrument with more modern flourishes. His band was a simple trio with percussion and bass. It was a set-up like this that I was drawn to, and I believe what I was going for when I wrote these songs. My acoustic style was already pretty percussive and intense, but I was interested in expanding on that with other instruments.

Of course, as so often happens, things didn't go exactly as planned, and these songs largely remained solo demos. I had a rehearsal with an upright bassist and percussionist, but that fizzled out. Only one of these tunes ("Dead Man") was ever played live, and even then only once. I moved on to other things, wrote more songs, and these songs were only heard by a handful of my friends.

Flash-forward to 2020/21 - With more time on my hands, I began to re-examine many of the songs I've recorded over the years but not released. Initially, I intended to release much of this material at once, dividing it up into acoustic and electric releases. These six songs were to be part of the "acoustic" series. But in listening to them again, I was struck by how well these particular tunes fit together. Obviously a major part of that being that they were all written and recorded at the same time, in the same way. I thought to myself - this is an album by itself.

The idea, however, of just releasing these songs as simple solo demos wasn't that exciting to me. Instead of lamenting how I wanted to play these songs with bass and percussion, I decided to try adding those elements myself. I wasn't quite sure how that was going to work, though. I didn't play these songs to a click, so I basically had to trust that I could play along with my own rhythm, 12 years later. I've done this in the past at times, and it's always a bit of a gamble. But the worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't work, and I just don't use those parts.

To anticipate what some will say - wouldn't it have been easier to simply re-record these songs now to a click and have other musicians or myself play to that? Well, yeah. It would certainly sound more professional that way. I didn't want to go that route, though, for two reasons. 1 - I think there's something to capturing the initial inspiration. I can't possibly re-capture the emotions I felt when I first wrote and sang these songs. They represent that time in my life, and that's what I wanted to put across here. And 2 - These are pretty difficult songs to sing, to begin with. I'm not even sure I can sing some of them any better than I did then. My range has probably dropped a bit, and changing the key would change the spirit of the song, in part.

So, with all that said, I'm proud to present these six songs now as one work, in a form close to my original intentions. These performances aren't perfect by any means, but they represent the essence of what I was going for, and they put across the songs first and foremost. For the instruments I added, I wanted to have them become part of the whole, and I think I managed to accomplish that. Someone who didn't read this whole explanation can hopefully listen to these tracks and not know that those instruments were added years later. For the most part, I kept it simple. The percussion accents the rhythm of the guitar, while the bass holds down the progression of the song. Where I would have put a guitar solo in a group context, I added some lead guitar. But unlike John Butler, this is strictly an acoustic affair, with no amplification or effects. It's closer to something Richie Havens would have done in the 60s and 70s, which is just fine by me. Above all else, I'm happy to finally put these songs out there into the world, and hope whoever listens to them will enjoy it as well. As the title track says, "you're never too far gone," and it's never too late to do something you haven't gotten around to, until now.

Postscript: The album cover is a picture I took in 2009 of a church in my neighborhood of Washington Heights. I managed to get the bird flying above the cross and gate, which I thought was a great image. When I was looking for a picture to represent this collection, I thought this one fit better than any other.