Hi Eric, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?

Honored to be back, lucky to be here and still making music after the past year of madness – thank you for having me!

Can you talk to us more about your latest single “Relay Road”?

With pleasure, since it’s the first of what I hope to be at least 12 singles – my goal is one per month for a year, followed by a full album in 2022!

Did any event in particular inspire you to write this song?

I would say that the song is a culmination of a lifetime of meaningful events as a music fan, capped off by two awful events that occurred in April 2020: the deaths of John Prine and Adam Schlesinger, two of my favorite songwriters.

There is no such thing as a casual John Prine fan.  To know JP is to love him, so the story of his last days was just gut-wrenching to me.  And the loss of Adam hit even harder because he was my age and he left behind two teenage daughters about the same ages as mine.  Between those deaths early in the lockdown, the murder of George Floyd, the fear and anger dividing the country…it felt like a fog of panic and sadness had descended.  I kept working and making music to keep my sanity, and thank God I had that. 

On Christmas Day I was walking my dog listening to one of my favorite early ‘80s records by the band X – specifically “The World’s A Mess It’s In My Kiss“ from their first EP. That opening line – “No one is united and all things are untied” – that’s always struck me as a punk rock versión of “The Second Coming” by Yeats. It seemed very of the moment so I . . . borrowed it. Yeah, that’s it . . . I “borrowed” it to start a new song, and the rest kind of wrote itself.

Any plans to release any sort of video for the track?

Done!  https://youtu.be/6iS7KY5HWiA The video took me longer to make than the song took to record.  I had a very specific vision and I had learned enough on my laptop to give it a shot putting it together on my own, as I had done with my music video about a certain New Jersey resident’s DUI charge in February. (https://youtu.be/VtbXAsEVCZY)   Inexperience and perfectionism are a dangerous combination, but I’m really proud of the final product.