STEVE2.NET

My singer songwriter friend Michael Allen (who has been the bass player for local rock act Jericho Turnpike) has most recently been writing, recording, and playing (solo) a whole bunch of shiny new songs. Funny, but it seems that we had been seeing and hearing each other around the town at various open mic events for months before we finally got around to talking to one another for any length of time about who we were, what we were doing, and who our common friends might be, it's such a small world sometimes! So, anyway, after hearing Michael play and sing on many occasions (and at the Barking Spider very recently) I invited him to play a Friday night solo set at the U.C. Arabica and this past weekend and he had a cozy and intimate audience that included his lovely young baby daughter Eva and her mom (Michael’s wife) Jennifer and also a few of their close friends - including Rodger Mendez and his wife, Beth. It was a good solid solo show, a real nice bare-bones reading of Michael’s new tunes - and afterwards Michael and I had a chance to talk a little bit about the 'demo' tunes he has been working on up in Detroit at Rust Belt Studios - and I admitted to him that I had an illegitimate copy (how appropriate!) of some of those tunes and that I have been listening to the mixes quite a bit recently, and the current opinion on my part is (drum roll please) that the mixes really rock! Mike has said that most of the vocal tracks are not 'final' in that they exist more in capacity as 'scratch tracks' however steve2 has noted with much stereo-turned-way-up-loud-during-morning-shower glee that the majority of the mixes sound really huge and totally professional just the way they are (scratch track vocals or not) so good in fact that they can be cranked WAY up LOUD because the guitars growl, sing, and twang just shimmeringly and the bass guitar sounds are sweeeeet and tiiiight and the drums are sounding, like, huge and perfect – sounds like with only a little more work on the voice parts Mike and Rust Belt will have put together a real nice slamming piece of rock and roll Detroit style by way of Cleveland!! Is that cool or what??

PS: You have no idea how badly I want to post a nice single MP3 from the oh-so ‘illegitimate copy’ of the tunes I have on hand – it takes allot of self control not to do so – and every day I listen to the mix I feel that self control slipping away… Agh! I cannot promise that I won’t DO IT!