Pinecone On Tent: Live at Bogies, Pocket Change

For those of you who don't know, Pinecone On Tent was my band back in the late 1990's. We were locally successful. We decided our first album was to be a live recording. We booked a weekend at Bogie's near LSU and recorded the whole deal.

I took the recordings to a studio where an engineer and I mixed and mastered it. Unfortunately there was a problem with the rhythm guitarist's track on the second night, so most of that was unusable. The best sounding takes were recorded early the first night.

The end result was nine tracks, most of which were my compositions. I swear it was because of technical difficulties and not my ego.

Unfortunately, by time the album was ready for release, the band stopped playing and eventually broke up. We were left with a great album, but no reason to promote it.

So for the first time ever, I will start releasing tracks from the album to the public. The first track from the album is called Pocket Change.

Pocket Change MP3 5.5 Mb

I wrote Pocket Change in an attempt to inject a little world beat into Pinecone's jam band repetoire. The main inspiration for it was "Long Train Running" by the Doobie Brothers.

We worked on the harmonies for a while. During the chorus,
"If you stop to think and look around
at all the good things to be found
you might have to stop to pick it up"
I sing it by myself the first time. Then Jeff Dupuis joins me the second time. The drummer comes in on the third time, with the rhythm guitarist coming in on the fourth. Then we sing it all together a fifth time. It has a nice effect if the repetiveness doesn't turn you off.

The lyrics have a positive message, but really they are about when I was a bum and would search the floors of a club at the end of the night. I had an irrational fear of having an empty pocket at any time.