The Big Day!

(drum roll, please)

You can now buy Ghost Notes and Songs from Memory at my Web site.



Woo hoo!



Yee haa!

I can't put into words what this means to me. The only thing I can compare it to is the feeling I had when the band released Wheelie, back in early December of 1994, walking through Yucca with a box of CDs on my shoulder, a roomful of eyes following me all the way to the back booth.

I got Wheelie feeling back!

Of course, these projects wouldn't have been possible without two very special people. My wife, Kel



Every artist needs his muse, and you'll find more than a little of Kel sprinkled lovingly throughout Ghost Notes and Songs from Memory. Kel is also the one person who read Ghost Notes over and over again, looking for everything from underdeveloped characters to awkward phrases to misplaced commas. Thank you for everything, honey.

The second person is my longtime friend and fellow Moline compatriot Bret Hartley



Bret took what was my idea of having a "single" for Ghost Notes and made it into a full-on CD. After what Bret did, I just hope people remember I wrote a book!

And you can hear one of Bret's many guitar-playing high points on the record this week at my MySpace Audio page. "I Don't Know Right Now" is a track we both kept making excuses to go back to in the studio, just because we wanted to listen to it again. (I'll have to write a blog one day about how the Meat Puppets brought the down-and-dirty out of this song.)

By the way, this is just the first of two release dates. The in-store release date is March 4, and all promotion starts on March 5 at Changing Hands in Tempe. After that, we've got confirmed dates--everything from readings to rock shows--in Phoenix, Denver, St. Louis, and Oklahoma City, and we hope to get many more as we move forward. I see these two babies taking me into October, and to both coasts. You'll get all event updates at this blog, but you can always check my Web site if you're curious. Click the Events tab on the left nav bar, and you'll have up-to-the-minute coverage.

For those of you who don't know, you can still get a peek of Ghost Notes at my Web site, too.

So, this is it. Buy Ghost Notes, or Songs from Memory, or Ghost Notes and Songs from Memory, and enjoy the read and the tunes. Don't hesitate to let me know what you think of both.

Think I'll break out the bass today and play some funkadelic. Who's comin' over?

Art