MUSIC (DEMOS)

HE DON’T LOVE YOU (LIKE THE WAY I DO)

Songs like this can just fall from the sky and make you think they’ve always been there hanging over you waiting to pick them like an apple from a tree. I couldn’t NOT have written this song. I don’t know how better to put that. I just got this song back in my hands on January 3, 2025 and, do you believe I forgot it even existed? I don’t because I frickin’ dig it. How could I forget something like this?

Written at Barrett Enterprises on one of the million nights I spent there alone trying to learn how to do this songwriting thing. I had made it through a phase with Whitebread, and then there was a four day love affair with the Sons of Cement Bones. THAT was where I caught the bug to be a songwriter. It was so EASY and it was the most fun I’d had yet being a musician. Just listening to those Cement Bones songs and knowing that we created them out of nothing but sweat and inspiration (James Brown’s STAR TIME box set had just come out that spring) made me hungry for more.

I remember moving the soundboard back about 40 feet from where we usually kept in and sitting at the controls with just a Nylon String guitar and playing until I couldn’t speak anymore and had to go home and pass out. I wrote 4 or 5 songs that week and had a cassette recorder patched in and recorded everything “live to two.” Straight into the board with no effects other than the atmosphere around me (which was boats). One of the songs I wrote that week was CRY which ended up on the Mr. Fables album LIFE ON LIFE’S TERMS. Each one of the songs on that tape was a love song.

I was also elbow deep into another box set which had been just released; DEREK AND THE DOMINOES LAYLA SESSIONS. The drama around that album….well…it was difficult not to get wrapped up in it when I was 23. It seemed romantic to be romantic about it. So I was. I was literally sitting in the dark for a couple of weeks by myself with that guitar and soundboard, caught up in a love affair that happened in 1971 to two people from England who were in fact caught up emulating a love affair that happened in the 7th century.

Recorded the same night as HONKIN’ ATCHA as far as I know. In fact, that song was the sound check for THIS song. Paul Lusky on lead acoustic and doing the mixdowns at what would be eventually known as The Rock Barn studio in East Hartland, CT.