Rachel On The Rooftops

My first ever solo single under my own name is released today. I’d love it if y’all took three minutes to give it a listen/watch the video. I’d love it even more if you shared it. Jörg Winzer of Winzer Records tells me it’s ‘a legit indierock hit’ and, well, that’d be awesome if it became one. I’m doing all the PR myself so shares are really fucking appreciated. It’s available everywhere except Spotify, for obvious reasons. V13.net premiered the video yesterday which is great. They also gave The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass a really kickass review, I ended up putting their “reads like it was written by Douglas Adams if he was raised in a record shop by Monty Python and Kurt Vonnegut” on the back cover of the latest edition

Thought I’d share the history of the song for you if you’re interested. It comes from a combination of forces both dark and light

See, back in 2019 I thought I was done with music. I’d given it a good run for decades of my life, wrote some great songs, played in some great bands, but the pull of stand-up comedy was taking over, another facet of my personality it felt pretty amazing to explore. In February of 2020, I packed my bags and headed out to Los Angeles again, determined to do it full-time. I had my first hour-long shows booked in London the following month. Three weeks after my arrival in LA, all that was no longer possible. During nine months of pretty much complete isolation I turned back to writing fiction, pushing the Young Southpaw stories, picking up the big Connecticut novel again, and eventually publishing Nick Cave’s Bar. And then it just seemed to be books, books, books. But sometime in 2021, somebody messaged me about making music again and I had hundreds of song ideas on my computer that I did want to see something happen with. We started writing, new stuff too, and every week in 2022 on my days off from work I’d drive three hours to the studio where we’d write and record then three hours home, and by November we had some 30 odd songs written and most of them recorded. And then we lost momentum. 2023 yielded one new song, a very good one, and upon my return from some Sporting Moustaches readings in LA in August of 2024, I got an email saying my songwriting partner wasn’t going to do it anymore. I tried hard to salvage an album out of it - I truly believe it would’ve been a killer record - but it was not to be. And I was very angry about this, not so much about it ending but ending with nothing to show for it.

Still stewing about this come the new year, luckily I discovered the music of Damien Youth. I’ve long been a big Glass Records fan and was psyched to have David Barker on the podcast back in November talking about the label. I pay attention whenever he releases something and come January, I got an email about Secret Doors Inside The Rain, an 18 song collection of Damien Youth’s songs chosen by David J. I put it on and was immediately blown away. Venus Kissing Mars is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard and there are so many other great ones. Damien’s output is ridiculous too. There’s 58 releases on his Bandcamp page. Which meant that for the first two months of this year every day I had something new to listen to. Most of which is pretty ace. And this got me thinking ‘I need to up my game’. I’ve gotta get all these songs I have lying around and in my head out into the world. And besides, in America at least, I’ve always had far more success when I’ve done it on my own

A mere 5 days after hearing Damien Youth for the first time, on January 15th 2025 my journal tells me, I had a very important dream. In the dream I was at the studio of my last musical project and all of a sudden I stood up and walked out. On the landing was an open window. I went through it onto the roof and my old friend Rachel was there.

At the beginning of the year I realized once again that if I wake up and play my guitar first thing then I am in a good mood for the rest of the day. It’s one of the things I love the most. I had been doing this since the New Year bringing great results but this particular day of January 15th, I was in a bit of a hurry and thought maybe I should skip it. I convinced myself to just pick up the guitar for 5 minutes and I’m so glad I did. I started trying to describe the dream and out popped Rachel On The Rooftops, pretty much intact. I then had to leave for a doctor appointment and in the waiting room the first name they called was ‘Rachel’, significant enough to also note in my journal

The lyrics were about 80% there and I played around with them for the next coupla days. I really liked the line ‘Rachel on the rooftops, radiates such sweet lost inbetweens’, a nice nod too to Inbetween, my first real band. To rhyme with this I came up with ‘lighting up my soporific scene’, which I was very unsure about, but now it might be my favourite line in the whole song [Soporific - ‘inducing sleep’ (many people have asked)] There’s also ‘I never hesitate on those night screens’. For as long as I can remember, since graduating college at least, this idea of closed eyelids acting as movie screens has played into my lyrics

The lyrics are what they are, and true, but the real importance of the song to me is that it seemed to be a direct message from my subconscious telling me ‘you can do this on your own, you have what it takes and you need to’. That I have great songs and really that music is such a part of me that I needed to dedicate a big part of my life to making it again. And since then I haven’t looked back. I’ve written about 20 new songs this year, a lot of them among my best. I can’t wait to record them all and get them out there. Playing Rachel and Sour Apple live has been hugely rewarding, and there’s a new one called Nightflowers that I absolutely love. I have a whole album’s worth, others marked for a few singles and EPs, and a plan for a little album of some of the stranger songs I’ve written lately. Just a matter of finding the time and money to make it all happen

As for recording Rachel, I pretty much immediately called up Sam Carlson who runs Sans Serif Studio in New Haven, CT who I’ve worked with a lot before and asked him to run through the song with me, him playing drums. And then we went into the studio to record just the two of us. I was psyched to try out my new Stromer Superfuzz pedal and my god, do I love how it sounds. So much so that while others have pics of their families/significant others/children, this photo is the home screen on my phone

It all came together very quickly and I could’ve done the bass myself but I used to play music with Dylan Rowe when I lived in Nashville and he’s one of the best bass players I’ve ever heard. I messaged him and he was up for it. And then I really wanted female backing vocals to do the ‘la-dah-dah-dah’s’, as if they were Rachel’s voice. I had interviewed Rachel Love a few years ago for the podcast and it was one of the few times I’ve actually been nervous. Dolly Mixture are one of my all-time favourite bands and I dearly love so many of their songs. I found it quite surreal that since the interview we interact on social media and she even bought a copy of Nick Cave’s Bar. I love her voice and with her name it seemed like it would be perfect. Again I was nervous but I sent her an email. And she awesomely wrote back that she’d love to do it. I had just asked for the ‘la-dah-dah-dah’s’ but she sent me back a bunch more, saying she had some fun in the studio that day. And my god! What she sent back - the chorus of voices you hear at the end - sounds so amazing, really making the song soar

I love how I united Nashville and England here, important places musically for me, as seemed only appropriate for a song to pull me back into the game. And for the video we would use the rooftops of New Haven, CT, the very city I would devour so much music in during my teenage years, shopping at Cutler’s and Rhymes Records, and going to as many shows as I possibly could at Toad’s Place and The Tune Inn. We just had to get the video made. Along the way there were a couple women who said they would play the part of Rachel, I was paying them too, so when they dropped out at the last minute, it was a real setback. I moved hours around at work one day to accommodate one’s schedule only for her to cancel at the very last minute. Having booked Connor Rog of Kicker Pictures to shoot that day, we went to the top of the Crown Street Parking Garage in New Haven and shot all my bits anyway. The wind was very much on our side that day

The clock was ticking, I had this new song I really wanted to release but I was determined to do it properly with a video. My only requirement for Rachel was a woman with dark curly hair. The song was finished in April and by the end of June I still wasn’t having any luck. Out to dinner with my family one night at one of my favourite restaurants I noticed a new waitress, not even our waitress, who had the look I had in mind. Upon leaving, I thought I should go back and ask her. I had to psych myself up to do it, I mean it’s an odd request of a stranger, and could come off as very creepy, but luckily Olivia Marino was up for it. She’d never acted or anything but was super professional, showed up and was awesome. My grandfather used to collect old radios, in fact had enough to start a Radio Museum in our town though the authorities shut him down for building code stuff before they could open. When he died we all took a radio, and late in the day I happened to spy mine again and thought it would be a nice tribute to him to have in the video, and to go along with the ‘Rachel’s on the radio’ line

Over the years some musicians I know would say that albums take so long to get out because the artwork always takes so much longer than you think. Which is kind of true. But my argument has always been, well just start working on the artwork as soon as you can then. I’ve been an admirer of Karl Christian Krumpholz’s work for some years now and we traded books back when The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass came out. Artwork is important and as I have some ideas for comics myself and know I’ll be in need of record sleeves being illustrated, I like to go to comics conventions to check out artists. This year I went down to BIC (Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase) and Karl was there. It was cool to hang with him and his lady Kelly for a bit and pick up his latest book, The Place We’re In Now, which features illustrations of some of my old Boston haunts, The Model and The Silhouette. We said we’d keep in touch and with him drawing such great cityscapes, I thought he’d be perfect to do the Rachel sleeve

And it turns out he was

And that is probably more than you ever wanted to know about this song : )

A Lighthouse I Ain’t Ever Been To I found on my phone when we started to record Rachel and I thought it’d be a great b-side for it. I had written it about a year before sitting in the basement bedroom at my parents’ house with a guitar, just describing all the things I saw around me as I strummed some chords I liked. There was a small wooden statue, a bouquet of fake flowers, and a painting of a lighthouse. One I’ve never been to. The song then expanded to became a meditation on life, love, luck, and pursuing dreams both musical and romantic. I really like “I’ve got a heart with some lines that’s been fractured sometimes but I just can’t seem to catch a break”

Hope you dig the single! And please share it if you’re so inclined. Let’s make it a hit