As a Jersey kid “down the shore” in the early 80s I blew a lot of time and money in boardwalk arcades trying to win glittery prizes. I recall a flimsy framed Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers “mirror” (the image of TP was mounted on tin foil) which I spent the Summer of 1983 pursuing until I finally scored enough prize tokens to claim it, bring it home to my suburban bedroom, hang it with pride in the space I had reserved for it at summer’s bloom…only to be awakened two nights later as it crumbled and fell, interrupting dreams of a tryst with Susanna Hoffs.

Somehow Jersey Frank’s Arcade didn’t issue warranties on boardwalk memorabilia forged in Tibetan sweatshops, so as my final year of Hammarskjöld Junior High School approached I learned the ephemerality of a summer’s worth of striving. It was a valuable life lesson.

Yet an even bigger life lesson came from the “coin pusher,” the arcade game to which I had fed most of my lawncare earnings that summer. It’s a machine full of metal tokens clustered on a powerful flat magnet, over which a mechanical arm pushes the accumulated loot towards the edge and into a chute when the coins finally break free. The trick is to drop your coin at just the right moment so that it will land flat between the mound of tokens and the mechanical arm, increasing the lateral force on the magnetized pile and the likelihood of dislodging the tokens hanging over the edge.

Those fallen tokens are your prize. About $50 worth of them will earn you a Tom Petty mirror that cost $3 in materials and labor to construct and is sufficiently secure to survive a trip to your car, a drive up the GSP and a mounting on your bedroom wall. Enjoy it while you can, young coddled 80s suburbanite, for very soon gravity will defeat the fruits of your labor fighting magnetism.

Forty-two years later I think of the coin pusher as a metaphor for my creative output as a songwriter.  I’ve spent more than four decades as a fan of great writing,  collecting so many musical and lyrical ideas from so many great writers, all piled onto the magnet of my memory. While many songwriters dry up in middle age, I’ve been lucky: those song tokens have reached a critical mass and the coin pusher in my brain has sent an unexpected volume of solid ideas down the creative chute.

The 12 tracks on this new album “Bittersweet” are the shiniest musical tokens to spill out over the three years since my last album, “No Defenses.” I think you’ll like them, and I’m hoping for a few more gems down the chute before I’m done.

Thanks so much for listening!