For the past year, I have been working/experimenting with loops and home recording to see what I wanted to do with my own music. Before this, I pretty much considered myself a blues bassist and songwriter and that was all I figured I would ever do. I still help host a blues jam each week, but I have been putting more and more of my energies into my solo/instrumental music. My first CD from my solo project, Narada Weeps, is an exploration of ambient jazz and electronica called, "The First Tear". The primary concept was to mix my bass playing with sequenced parts and loops to create songs. I just jumped in with no real direction on style or content; whatever came to me is what I recorded. Thus, it is a strange mixture of material. However, the tracks (you can go to http://www.soundclick.com/naradaweeps to listen to them) did lead me to develop my focus for the next phase of the project. For 2008, I've started the ground work to get more into the chord/melody approach with the bass and will be getting away from the ambient/electronica feel and moving toward more of a smooth jazz sound. I will also be composing the new material with live performances in mind. The songs will be playable by me solo (with a looping pedal so I can accompany myself) or in a duo/trio format. This will allow me a lot of flexibility in bringing Narada Weeps to the stage while letting other musicians come and go as their time and interests permit. All in all, I'm pretty happy with my musical direction at the moment.

I have done most of my blogging on my myspace page, http://www.myspace.com/naradaweeps , for those interested. However, I think I'm going to start focusing more of my musical work on soundclick so I figure I might as well start using the blog feature here to keep folks, as if anyone cares, informed of how things are going. So, if I like how this comes out, I'll put something together for this weekend to post here.