• Brewing up a bit of Java Junkie (like a day out of my past).

Before the babies were born, if I wasn’t freelancing somewhere, I whiled away the day writing songs and maybe even going into the recording studio on occasion. December 5, 2010, changed all that. Suddenly, Avalon and Amelia were my main priority and everything not only seemed but also was a lot less important. All of which is to say I haven’t written a new song in nearly a year and my studio days are far and few between. But yesterday was different. I had scheduled a session at Hyde Street eons ago and the day was finally here. In addition, I needed to take the car into the garage and at first I was worried that I would have to rush to drop off the the car, rush to get to the studio, rush through the session so that I could go pick up the car, rush back to the session to rush through any final changes, then rush home to help Catherine with the evening feeding. As it turned out, I didn’t have to rush much at all. The garage is in central in SF, near Hyde Street, so after dropping off the car, I had time to kill and lots of good places to kill it. I opted for Café Rulli on Union Square and after a ten minute walk, I arrived to find a corner table with my name on it. I got out my laptop and my lyric book, arranged my coffee and pastry and proceeded to spend a bit of time surfing the ‘net and catching up on an email or two, but then I packed up and headed out to a bench in the shade where I got out my lyric book again and started going through the many half-baked songs that fill it. Luxury. I didn’t finish anything, but no matter, I made progress on several songs and that meant the world. Around noon, I walked over to Hyde Street where Dave Brogan and Jaime were finishing up getting drum tones and about an hour later bassist Sam Bevan arrived and the session was on. We were going to do two songs, one a reggae number called Java Junkie and the other a Deep Salvage tune called Undeserving. Java Junkie took a bit longer than everyone expected, though, so in the end we opted to do Undeserving another day. And that’s okay. I walked out of Hyde Street into a still bright city, got in my car and was home by six. The babies were still up, but Catherine had fed them on her own (not easy!), so I read bedtime stories and prepped dinner. A good day.