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Thank you all so much for the support you’ve shown. It’s story time, and I’ve been waiting to introduce the musicians to you.
Strap in 🙂
I’m posting here (and everywhere) to announce that a new song featuring my friends and I, “YOU AND TEQUILA”, is available on all major streaming platforms.
I’ve been away from the music-making business for a decade.
The question always came back to:
Would there ever be a level playing field for the everyday
‘Joe Smith’-type musicians of the world.
Keeping an eye on things recently has led me to believe this seems like as good of a climate as any we’ve had since 2004, so ‘here I am again’.
My friend John Mongeau (pictured above) passed away this winter
after a long battle with Cancer.
‘Jojo’ was a good ol’ boy who fought courageously. We lived together on High St in Winsted in our 20’s and spent a lot of time wasting time and dreaming of a better way to do everything. His passing tilted my hourglass into an unfavorable position. It was right around the time of my birthday, and I decided the best way to honor ‘Joej’ was NOT to go out and play a benefit gig or show,
but to get back to the fun of recording original music.
It wasn’t going to be easy, so I planned out a ‘training’ schedule.
The finding and taking apart of my guitars and amplifiers (which had been out of sight for a decade in a cold, dark, but dry, storage cube). Trying to rebuild them, and myself, as quickly as possible. I used a Phil Collins song, (which was against all odds), (no…I actually used AGAINST ALL ODDS) to get back in shape. However, I wasn’t ready to jump back in to the world of music just yet.
It was hard to put into words why I needed MORE motivation, but, my friend Melissa O’Brien nailed it perfectly.
I needed a deadline.
I gave myself the task of setting up a mobile recording studio. I was fortunate enough to strike a deal using the Upstairs Lounge Theatre at the GILSON CAFÉ AND CINEMA. Instantly I was up there during the wee hours of the night in the middle of April 2025 putting myself through a ‘boot camp’.
Why this song?
I’m not a Country Music aficionado, but I can recall hearing YOU AND TEQUILA as sung by Kenny Chesney in 2011. Around that time I was playing three to four nights a week as a solo-acoustic act in bars and breweries. I was playing “TEQUILA MAKES HER CLOTHES FALL OFF” every night. I noticed that there’s a connection with the crowds and the word TEQUILA. Even if someone’s drinking a red wine or a Gin & Tonic, they seem to smile inside at the thought of that first time someone tried to make them drink tequila. How much fun it was at first…and how the night eventually ended up going. They survived, and won’t be drinking it again any time soon, but love thinking about where their pants might have ended up… or just who that woman was at the 24 hour Diner whose shoes you liked and bought right off her feet.
Always looking for cool new songs, I figured this would fit right in as I sang behind the chicken wire fence at some of the places I was playing.
I’d never recorded or engineered a song before all by my lonesome.
I’d had the pleasure and luxury of watching Paul Lusky at The Rock Barn for three years. We were busy making music in the early 2000’s.
Having plenty of raw original material to record, I started thinking about which song to start the project. I decided on an original song named “LET’S PRETEND”. I quickly recalled the frustrations that come along with any new project would….’season’…the end result in my mind somehow, and that I should put myself through this ‘boot camp’ of sorts. I thought about it for a while that week, wondering what to do for a project? I remembered Dom Ursone and I using “TONIGHT, I’LL BE STAYING HERE WITH YOU” by Bob Dylan as an icebreaker in the studio when we made our first album, HINDSIGHT. A cover song! Perfect! Now, which one? Oof.
Just that night, my phone alerted me that my Cloud was full and could not be backed up. (I’m sure you’ve never seen this alert before, as you’re on top of things and couldn’t possibly be as henpecked as I am about phone storage. I, however, became frustrated the first time I saw it and swore I’d do something about it someday. That someday was just then, as I knew I was going to need all the storage and bandwidth available to the normal human music studio engineer and producer.) I dug into my phone’s Files shocked at the things I’d downloaded over the years without my knowledge DELETE! DELETE! DELETE! I was on a roll! My phone felt lighter! Things were going great, and I was almost done when I saw an .mp3 file with an odd ZZEY-type name and ALMOST deleted it. Instead, I clicked on it. Surprisingly, it was a demo of YOU AND TEQUILA from when I was living in East Granby, CT. The date of the recording said 3/27/20, and the memory came back instantly.
I was given the gift of an acoustic guitar that year via my parents. It was a gaudy blue number with garish imitation abalone binding around the outside and on the fretboard in the shape of birds. The blue paint had a pearl dusting on top under the gloss finish. It sparkled like a Unicorn in a sun shower of blueberry rock candy comets.
I was appalled.
‘ESTEBAN’ was stitched in silver across the shoulder strap. Oh, man….this was that guy! The guy with the matador hat and the sunglasses on QVC! They got my Mom! Damn!
It came with 10 hour long DVD’s on how to learn guitar.
Damn, Ma.*
It was a gift, so I thanked them, of course. I didn’t need another guitar, but the universe had handed me one and I should be grateful. I took it home, in its blue canvas and foam zippered case (which was quite nice) and wondered what our future would be together. It was the first week of March 2020.
We all know what happened two weeks later.
Calling my parents religiously to make sure they were OK every day became my new hobby. One night Mom asked if I had played the blue beast yet. I had not, and she sounded a tad disappointed. Hoping to keep her spirits high during the beginning of the worldwide pandemic, I promised her I would play it later that night.
I picked up the guitar and tried to get it in tune as best I could, and then decided to record a phone demo so that I could prove to Mom that I’d used it. I grabbed my old binder of songs and lyrics off the pile of books in the corner. Leafing through the pages, I came across YOU AND TEQUILA. I smiled devilishly. The day I’d heard it I’d instantly liked the sentiment, but, upon repeated listening I wondered if an upbeat version would work. I filed that idea under ‘someday’ and now ‘someday’ had arrived. I recorded the demo, played it for Mom one day, and forgot about it for 5 years.
So that sealed it. Mom’s Birthday Gift was getting the spotlight that it always wanted…. no matter how much I wanted to hide it from the world. I’d use YOU AND TEQUILA as my ‘boot camp’ song.
MARCH 2025 came and went, and I even bought a new guitar to further put myself under the gun and put pressure on me to get my ass in gear.
I got a full head of steam going and in the final week of April I began recording YOU AND TEQUILA. I had a guide track and needed to start thinking about getting some musicians to play the other parts. The time I could record at (due to my work schedule) was not ideal for normal humans, and it was tense and fun, but we all enjoyed working hard on this one. I’m excited for people to hear it.
The technology available to us today made it so easy to pull this track together. I saw my friend Carson Webb (pictured above) at the gym working off his nightly bag of cheese puffs and asked him if he wanted to record drums on a track I was working on. Surprisingly, he said yes. I emailed him the demo and the guide tracks
I’d already laid down.
I called Peter Fagan (pictured above) and asked if he’d play piano. I knew he’d say yes.
And that rug really tied the room together, did it not?
I told my old friend and former bandmate Kevin Beck (pictured above) to come up with a dramatic soap-opera soundtrack organ part. He was in. Whether he liked it or not.
Lastly, I called up Frank Brocklehurst (pictured above) to email me a bass line. Easy stuff for Frank.
Deadline was set. Tracks were in, and now came the fun part.
The mixdown and the decision making. Pressure! Ah, delicious pressure!
The date is now May the 5th, and Boot Camp is officially over.
You can find “YOU AND TEQUILA” on all streaming platforms as of today.
I don’t foresee the music business to go back the way it was so there won’t be any live shows coming from this, but there will be more recorded music.
I’m looking forward to getting those songs off of my ‘demo’ list
and in the ‘published’ pile!
Thanks for any support you can give!
– Search for the track on your favorite music streaming platform?
– Tell your friends?
– Share it on a social media account?
– Anything would be appreciated.
The guys and I worked hard to put this together and they deserve their flowers.
(Not real flowers.)
(I think Carson has allergies.)
Best,
Joesmith(Realname)
back to paragraph
*I leave my Dad out of this because he had a history with the guitar. He only liked Blues guitars and guitarists. He was in the Air Force down Texas way in the late 1950’s and was lucky enough to see the men whom would eventually inspire Stevie Ray Vaughan whom Dad considered the greatest guitar player on Earth. An example of my Dad and I talking music always comes back to this exchange:
JOE: “Pop, check out this new song I wrote.”
DAD: (quite seriously) “That doesn’t sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
JOE: “………..”
DAD: “Pass the meatballs.”
So, when I say he had no influence or even knowledge of buying me a sparkly blue folk singer’s broadcast banjo, I mean he for sure did not.
joesmithrealname.com 