tour the music

dandelion woman

Sometimes, things just aren’t as they first appear….
This is a record we mostly recorded in a spare bedroom out in Pekin, IL. All these songs were released as singles before we compiled them into this little record. It’s called Dandelion Woman.

The title track on this record is definitely my favorite. And I wanted to start the tour here, because the “sound” of this song is the direction that our most current music is making…it’s certainly the closest to our “live sound,” as well.

We call it BLACK DIRT COUNTRY ROCK

If ya dig it, here’s a download and some links to listen to the whole album on Spotify or Apple.

Here are the two pages in my writing notebook where I scribbled down the lyrics to “Dandelion Woman” back on June 25, 2017. Believe it or not, this is actually pretty clean and straight forward! Usually, it takes several more pages and many more rejected lines, words, concepts, etc. for me to finally put a finished song together. You can see where I tried out some different verses and moved the order of them around some. I wrote all the lyrics and most of the melody lines, but Dave Glover - our guitar player - helped put some of the riffs and melodic pieces together. Speaking of which…

Look at that clean cut feller in the lawn chair. This was during a photo shoot, back in 2017. In a shoot like this, there is plenty of time to sit around drinkin’ and pluckin’ on the guitar while the photographer (Loren Root) takes his shots. By the end of this shoot, Loren was anxious for me to write what turned into the song “Dandelion Woman,” because I had sat there trying to work out the main guitar riff through most of the photo shoot. I eventually took this undeveloped melodic idea to a rehearsal and Dave Glover finished the riff. But I still needed a concept for the lyrics…something kind of dark…maybe foreboding…

I keep a list of random song ideas in my phone and in a notebook. It might be one word, a phrase or an entire verse. Sometimes it has a melody with it already, and sometimes it doesn’t. I might wake up in the night and jot it down. I might be in the middle of dinner, a TV show, driving down the road, you get the point. Well, I combed through this list when I was searching for ideas for this melody. At some point, I had written “Dandelion Woman” on this list. Nothing more. But what’s a “Dandelion Woman”?…

I remember being a kid and going out on the playground at school. Certain times of year, the ground would be covered in dandelions. We’d pick ‘em and take them into our teachers. I remember on one occasion (I was probably in 2nd grade or something close), my teacher dismissed my offering and told me, “Those are just weeds. Throw them away.” I got to thinkin’ about that. They didn’t look like weeds. They sure looked pretty to me. Well, a couple decades later, that experience teamed up with my imagination and a certain melody line. I think the song itself tells the rest of the story…