Original Song Project: Jeff Stovall - Revolution And Insomnia and Down Around

You might recall a previous installment of this project featuring a song by The Dirt Floor entitled San Joaquin.  The author of that song, Jeff Stovall, is our featured singer songwriter today. In between milking goats and pruning old ornery apple trees on his property in Willits, California, Jeff has been putting together some demos for a solo project. Today we have a couple of the demos written and performed by Jeff and presented here for your listening pleasure.  Us flipsiders are diggin' it!

Enjoy and, as always, feel free to comment.

Revolution and Insomnia

Down Around

You may listen to other OSP posts by clicking on the link at the Jump Station at right.  If you have some original material you think might be a good fit for Flip-side, just forward your recording to flip west or flip central and we'll get on back to you.

Original Song Project: The Dirt Floor - San Joaquin

The Dirt Floor is a five piece band out of Mendocino County (Willits, to be precise) playing our own special type of acoustic electric miscellanea.  We're bluegrass...folk-country...tight minor key gypsy instrumentals or loosely-played punkgrass, from the transcendental to the irreverent.  We've been playing and writing for some five years now and we do it all with guitars, banjos, mandolins, harmonicas, bass, drums and three singer-songwriters. I'm on banjo in the picture above. Join us for our slightly insane take on music and watch us freak out, if you want.

Here's a tune I wrote, San Joaquin.  The music for San Joaquin came together out of an intro in one key and a main riff in another key.  Either of the components could have been played in a different key to make them work together, but in the end they were joined by extending the intro and shifting minor and major chords to resolve in the key of the body of the song.  The first verse, spontaneous and improvisational, was left in and ended up setting the tone for the song, which is about getting older and trying to deal with holding on to the ones you love in a treacherous world.  In many cases it is treacherous because of one's own deeds.  Thanks for listening. - Jeff S.