What's This Music For?

What do you get when you combine a clandestine love affair, a kiddie show host, and two Michael McDonald impersonators?  Why, our music video for “Paragon”, of course.  This is the fourth single from Skeleton Crew, and I think you’ll find that it’s unforgettable.  Whether that’s a good or bad thing is another matter.  Is it a zany tour-de-farce?  Is it the worst video ever made?  Is it both?  You decide!

Here’s a teaser from our next music video, coming soon.  Yes, everything is better with beards.

“Westwood” was written on January 28, 2013, in the midst of recording Skeleton Crew, and was the last song written for that album. I had a dream that I was writing a song with Tom Petty. I was showing him the working lyric sheet, where I had written the original lyrics and my friend Will Henson had made some notes underneath. Petty was questioning me about the story told in the song, to clarify its meaning. I could hear him singing the song in the dream. In the middle of all this, my wife unintentionally woke me up. Fortunately, the melody of the song was still in my head, as well as the words we were working on, which ended up being the third verse and a little of the chorus. I also remembered the title of the song. I lay in bed but couldn’t get to sleep, and bit by bit I began to write down the lyrics in the dark so I wouldn’t forget them. After I while I got out of bed, grabbed a guitar, and finished writing the words and the music; within an hour I had the song finished and a demo recorded. I always felt like the song resembled some other song, but I could never identify what it was. For me, Westwood is where “progress” is always leading us. It sounds great in theory but the results are usually not all they’re cracked up to be.

The video was mostly recorded on the highways around my house, and at a friend’s home. There is also some footage of Trammel, VA, an old coal-mining “company town” not far from where I grew up; it was hit hard economically as coal mines and preparation plants were shut down in latter part of the last century.