When your beard turns white and you chuck your former life and move to a mountain village in the tropics, there is a tendency among some people to think that maybe you are possessed of a certain wisdom. I am here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.
Sometimes people come to visit me here and think that I have wisdom to dispense to them: I do not. I have opinions, I have ideas, I have observations - but none of them should ever be taken seriously as some sort of representation of TRUTH. It needs to be said here, for the record, and for all time: I am completely open to the possibility - maybe probability - that I am entirely full of shit.
Such people leave disappointed, I suppose. But sometimes they contribute a track or two to what I am working on - a rhythm track, a harmony, a bass line.... I am grateful. Thank you.
Latest News
Axixic's sophomore CD -BALLAD- has been released!
On Becoming Axixic
I discovered music in 1965 when I was eight years old. Country music dominated in my home and I didn't know there was anything else - just Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline. I was aware of The Beatles, of course, but they never got played at my house.
Then someone (it may have been my grandmother) gave me Beatles '65 - my first LP. That changed everything. 'I Feel Fine' - just 2:19 in length - was unlike anything I had ever heard before. Eventually I grew to love all the songs on the LP (and all the other Beatles' LPs) but 'I Feel Fine' changed me.
There was a kid who lived on the block behind mine who also loved The Beatles. Wayne was ten. Two years older is a lot at that age, but we became good friends. While other kids we knew were playing 'Army', Wayne and I played 'Group'. We pretended we were writing songs by putting our own words to existing ones - Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Animals - Wayne's older brothers (he was the youngest of four boys) had rich collections of 45s and LPs and we devoured them.
Someone gave Wayne a hand-me-down guitar and a book of chords and we struggled to learn to play. Later, I would turn to drums but always kept my hand in on guitar, especially once I got one of my own. I got good; Wayne got phenomenal.
We taught each other how to write songs. And we wrote a LOT of them.
Wayne was born to be a performer; I was not. I got a job, got married, started a family - Wayne gigged. But we kept writing - original songs for Wayne to record and perform. He developed a loyal following and performed until his health no longer allowed it.
Wayne really only wanted to perform pop music. He was the performer; we did what he wanted. If I came up with an idea for a country song and had a great hook or some interesting lyrics we would do it - but never jazz, folk, or bluegrass.
So I got the idea to do my own album. Country, jazz, bluegrass, folk - the stuff Wayne didn't really want to do. I toyed with this idea for years.
I collected song ideas. The album would be about the illusion of separateness (that was the working title for a long time). Songs about splitting up, feeling apart, aloneness. Two divorces provided lots of fodder for the theme.
I moved to Mexico and started working on it. A few songs were already written but I needed more. While writing and recording, the idea evolved further and some positive stuff started to creep in (it happens).
For years I carried around this metaphor to describe two contradictory ideas: living in the moment -or- doing one thing when you really should be doing something else. That metaphor was 'dancing on the moon' and it seemed to describe what I was doing in Mexico. I decided to turn it into a song and, loving irony, decided it should be a pop song to bring the thing full circle.
The album took a year to complete.