Some years back, I was in a 3-piece band as the guitarist with my buddies Andrew McClendon on drums and Andy Perez Andy Perez on bass guitar.  I was elected the lead writer, which was an extremely daunting task because I have never had any formal music training or schooling.  I have been playing guitar since I was 16, but it has been all by ear, tablature, and primarily improvised on-the-spot.  On top of that, Andy went to music school and knew virtually everything about guitar, bass, and piano so I was very intimidated to become the lead writer.  I shared that my style has always been to just play what is on my mind, with no safety net, and just melt together into the sounds and hopefully by the end of the session we would have some pieces of salvageable value among the noodle garbage. 

This is how I play at home, so it was the only tool I knew how to use.  Our band practice would consist of 3 parts: Rehearsing the pieces that were written in advance, sharing recordings/riffs of new pieces I had written at home, and then my personal favorite – the improvised jamming!  Ok fine there was a 4th part – drinking some Sam Adams Oktoberfest 😉

I could not WAIT to get to the improvised section of our sessions.  Although we were playing music the entire session, for me the session routine felt like “Ok, we can actually play AFTER we do our homework” Where the rehearsed part was the homework, but the improvised jam was the cake!  As every band knows, we consistently encountered that annoying experience where at the end of an amazing session, we would look at each other like “Wow, that was something else!” only to find that NO ONE RECORDED OR CAPTURED IT!!!! This would not take away from how much fun it was, but it became what felt like a formulaic curse where if we made sure to record the session, it would not go well and if we didn’t record it then magic would happen lol.  There were a handful of times where we were able to capture the lightning in a bottle, and this was one of them! 

To this day, it is a personal favorite of mine because it truly captured the ups and downs of how I was feeling at the time, and I was able to get all of that out on the guitar as if it were a therapy session.  As per the rules, we never played this before.  We just started playing, and let the state of flow take over.  I called this one “Tide”.  I later started recording a studio version of this, which was quite different, and wonderful in it’s own right, but there was just something special about this session that could not be replicated.