Jack Hayden - Wandering Eyes

Happy birthday to our West Coast Flipster, Jack Hayden. 

Original Song Project - Morgan Young -- Nothing Left To Lose

A quiet whimper offered for your use about a dirty little town of stray dogs, lust and hate. I hope you enjoy.

Photograph (C) Morgan Young, 2011

Original Song Project: Jeff Stovall - Middle Lila

Willets, California singer/songwriter and Original Song Project veteran, Jeff Stovall, kicked off his Kickstarter campaign today and we at Flip-side are dang excited.  Check out his campaign here and meanwhile you can listen to his song Middle Lila below. It's a demo of one of the songs that he will be featuring on his first record. We encourage you to get behind this incredible talent.

Until next time, see you on the flip-side!

Original Song Project: Jack Hayden - Long Time Comin'

Here's a song about redemption I wrote while I was living up on the South Yuba River in the little town of Washington. Recorded last week on the same digital recorder used on the busker recordings. I hope you enjoy.

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: Morgan Young - The Jamestown Hop

This song has lyrics, but I've never been satisfied with the vocal performances I've put forth on them. It's now been gathering digital dust for a year and I don't think I'll ever return to trying to do more with it. So, here it is.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - This Song For Sale

As I mowed the lawn one day while listening to my iPod, I was struck by commonality of lyrical themes in much of the music to which I was listening. Particularly in the older country songs by Mel Tillis, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. That got me thinking about the world of professional song writers (to point, not performers, just the composers) and their inevitable approach to music not as a passion play, perhaps not even as an art, but most definitely as a commodity to be traded.

The spew of that thought is this song, This Song for Sale. It was one of those spontaneous compositions that took me less than 10 minutes to write. I didn't do much with it for over a year and finally rediscovered it myself. Upon rediscovering it in my dusty memory, I decided I actually liked it. A quick recording of the song and here I am sharing it with you.

I hope you like.

Original Song Project: Morgan Young - Ride That Stingray!

Here is a song I wrote about a friend's tale of running away from home when he was a young lad. I've embellished with some of my own memories and a little reminiscing about the feel of 21 pounds of steel thunder between the legs and the smell of freedom that is the open road.

I, of course, am talking about the moment we all got our first Schwinn Stingray, cruised the neighborhood with the other ruffians and tried desperately to shake our Born To Be Mild reality.

I'm using a 1967 Gibson EB2D bass, a Gibson J200 acoustic, a Fender Tele and big steaming pile of false rockabilly bravado. Some photos for this post came from the blog, The Selvedge Yard.

I hope you enjoy.

Original Song Project: "West Virginia Side", Jeff O'Connor

(c2010 Jeffrey O'Connor)

Several years ago I went on a canoe trip with five friends on the upper Potomac river. The first morning was particularly beautiful. It was springtime, unseasonably warm, and just as peaceful and tranquil as you can imagine. After paddling for a while, my friend in one of the other canoes said, "Hey, let's paddle over to the West Virginia side." It caught me off guard, because, until that moment, I hadn't even realized that the far bank WAS West Virginia...I had just assumed that the other side of the Potomac where we put in was Virginia. Even though I am an experienced canoeist, I was not involved in the trip planning outside of renting the canoes, and in the rush to get ready and get out of DC, I'm embarrassed to admit that I hadn't even looked at a map! So, of course, I looked like a total idiot, and we all had a good laugh at my expense as we headed over to the West Virginia side.

The next day it gently rained all morning and we kept paddling on anyway. I loved it. At one point though, the skies really opened up and it began to absolutely pour. However, right at that moment, we were lucky enough to come upon a small bridge, under which we could take cover. So, we parked there, under that old bridge, and waited out the cloudburst while enjoying our fine lunch of Clif bars and Budweiser in cans as the rain pounded onto the river just ten feet away.

That pretty much sums up what this song is about. It originally had lyrics, but I hated them, so into the river they went.

--Jeff

(c2010 Jeffrey O'Connor)

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.

Original Song Project: "Blame the Beat Poet", Matt Howard

Hi there, my name is Matt Howard.  I currently reside in the small town of Harrison, Arkansas. This is a song I wrote called Blame the Beat Poet.  It's a song about two people drifting apart, written in a sort of punk/country style.  The organ and drums were provided by a Yamaha keyboard with an acoustic guitar to fill out the sound.

If you like it I have more songs on my myspace. (myspace.com/rivervalleysermon).

Original Song Project: Jack Hayden, Screwed Tight

Here's an instrumental I recorded a while back. It's an open tuning (DADF#AD) played on a Martin OM-21. Basically I liked the opening phrasing and thought I might improvise off it, recorded it once and forgot about it. Later, it stood out as a decent recording ....