Originally written in 1993, “The Trick” is one of the oldest tracks on the MEMOIRS OF A MANWHORE: THE REELING WALTZ OF A DRUNKEN LOTHARIO album. The first official recording, however, is the MEMOIRS rendition, for which Adam Silverstein devised an arrangement so perfectly Billy Joel that you’d have thought that it was a lost track from the Piano Man’s Turnstiles album. Consequently, there’s not a whole lot surprising about this playlist, but there is an awful lot of great mus

I wrote “Hotel By The River” and “Jump Into the River” on the same day in the late 90s or early 00s. I don’t remember which year, although I do recall the occasion to write the two songs in one day: I had learned of a songwriting contest sponsored by a well-known (and now-defunct) coffee house in Bryn Mawr in conjunction with a radio station. The theme was “The River,” and I had something like two days before the deadline. While “Jump Into the River” was my homage to trip-hop

“Hip Little City” is my tribute to Red Bank NJ circa 2005 (before I actually lived there) and the characters I frequently interacted with when I’d go there just to hang, people-watch, and escape the general insipidness of Brick NJ, where I was living when I took care of my grandmother. There’s a good deal of ribbing and tongue-in-cheekiness, but there’s also genuine affection for the town. Adam Silverstein’s arrangement definitely harkens back to early-to-mid-70s Elton John,

So, “Patty Cakes” is a fun little song (and another composition of mine that could have been a lost track from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road road album) about an angry, vindictive woman. It certainly follows in the footsteps of many of Ben Folds’s snarkier kiss-off songs, and the story line also makes it feel like it should be part of Eric Schwartz’s catalogue of songs about lesbians. However, this playlist also includes some songs from a number of fairly righteously

“Happy to Be Your Whore” is one of my “old Detroit airport terminal” songs. I wrote this song (along with “Sad Sack” and “Three Rings”) while stuck in the old terminal at the Detroit airport in October 2008 (the next day I wrote “Anchors Aweigh,” followed by “For Delilah, Forgiveness” another five days later). These songs served as the crux of what would become the MEMOIRS OF A MANWHORE: THE REELING WALTZ OF A DRUNKEN LOTHARIO album. Five additional songs were culled from my

I’ll be making little notes for each of the songs on my older albums as well as those on the newer albums... So, let’s start with “Three Rings,” the opening track from the MEMOIRS OF A MANWHORE album. At the time, I was devouring Tom Waits’s catalogue. The songs on this album really began as an emulation of his earlier albums: Closing Time, Small Change, Heart of a Saturday Night, and such, when he was primarily a sensitive troubadour with a piano and a left-of-center (but no

When the Avenging Digital Angels arrive, will it be too late for the Singularity to save us? Will we upload our consciousnesses into something greater than our individual, petty spheres, or will we become just chunks of data coded into a subroutine that nobody cares about? “Sleep” explores this concept: Technology has provided us the opportunity to become part of a larger community, but instead, most people have used it to isolate themselves from the world around them. These

What happens when all the ancient Gods return and find the mess mankind has made of this world? They hit reset. It may be flood; it may be fire. Kind of what it feels like is happening now... That’s what The General Electorate’s “Thank You For Playing Our Game” is about. This song is a 50/50 collaboration with Dan Lewis of The Tomorrow File, who wrote the first verse and bridge (lyrics and melody), to which I added the chorus (lyrics and melody) and second verse (melody only)

Written in March 2016, “Beach on the Moon” is a lament of the rising tide of ignorance, intolerance, and neo-fascism (in conjunction with unbridled conspicuous consumerism) parading as patriotism in our current culture. The song has an odd structure -- even within the fairly standard chorus/verse portions (which are neither choruses nor verses, but something in between), you get a modulating chord structure; then there’s the weird almost-song-within-a-song that comprises the

“The Courage of Cowardice” takes aim at hawks who have always managed to avoid direct peril but have no problem sending young Americans, most of them from the working classes, into the direct line of fire. Written in April 2016, there are obvious and direct references to the unsavory demagogue whose rhetoric managed to whip an ignorant, foolish, and easily-fooled voting bloc into the booths on his behalf, despite the fact that even a modicum of analytical capacity should have