King For A Day

I haven't put up any music for a while, so here's something old. At least old in my world. I played in a band called Stride in the late 90's. All original material, all penned by yours truly. We were a bit Spinal Tapish, where they lost drummers to horrific gardening accidents and the like, we lost bass players. Except our group loss was due to more mundane life events. One bass player decided he wanted to concentrate on his career, another bass player was ritually killed when we discovered he liked Dave Matthews and Phish. A third just kinda drifted away, (we can't even remember his name), the last bass player and the one with whom we played the most shows, and in whose basement we recorded this song, became a Dad and moved across the bay to Oakland. We even had a beautiful female keyboard player at the outset. She had once toured as a session musician with Tom Tom Club, and got to hang out with Prince. She left us and joined an ashram, and ultimately became an astrologer. Now that's pretty rock n roll.

You have no idea how weird people really are until you hold auditions for bass players. Trust me on that one.

The song is called "King For a Day", and I am still not sure what I was writing about. I wrote the first verse while traveling in India, and the second came a year later when I was getting songs ready for the band. The recording was rough and ready, we set up the drums in a concrete basement, not a ideal environment. Nor were we particularly versed in the art of recording. We then stuck some borrowed mics up and hit record. The song is a first take, with some extra guitars and vocals overdubbed later in my home studio. For a long time all I could hear was what was wrong with the recording. However 7 years on, I really like this. I think it has a certain garage band charm. I really like my guitar solo, which was improvised on a single take.

Click here to listen, right click and "save as" to download:

King For A Day