As you may have heard, I'm doing a short tour (ten shows) in the northeast from April 26th thru May 4. Here are the dates and venues. Anyone in the area who's interested should stop by and say hey or something.

On this tour, I'm one of a group of west coast singer-songwriters, including Bart Davenport, formerly of the Loved Ones, Ian Brennan, Greg Heller, and a few others. I'll be playing solo, acoustic. I'll probably play most requests, if you mention them to me before the set (and if I can remember how they go.)

Otherwise here's my plan: I'm going to play some old favorites from "the catalog" plus some stuff, old and new, that hasn't been released. I'm going to try to preview some of the stuff that we're considering for the new MTX album that will be recorded this summer, see how people react to the raw songs, that sort of thing.

I've been thinking about how comments on the songs and criticism or discussion of the songwriting always occurs after the record has already been made. There's nothing wrong with that, but why can't it happen before that? I've noticed that when you play unreleased songs acoustically, people seem to pay a bit more attention to the songs as songs. I've had some of the most interesting conversations about songs and songwriting with people I've seen at solo shows. Perhaps this sounds a bit corny, but I honestly feel I've learned valuable things about my own songs from this kind of discussion. And I thought it might be interesting to try to encourage that kind of conversation, in perhaps a slightly more organized way.

So: I've never done anything like this before, but I'll be selling (cheap) a little home-made CD of a few not-yet-released, mostly-acoustic songs I recorded in my bedroom. Some of this material may end up being recorded for the album, while a lot of it may not; some of it may be done so differently that it's hardly recognizable. It's not by any means what the album "will sound like." It's just what I feel is a pretty interesting little collection of songs.

What I'm kind of hoping is that people will come to the shows, listen to the songs I play and the ones they take home on the CD, and give me some feedback on the songs. Not the "production" (such as it is-- it ain't too special) or arrangements or anything like that-- I'm more interested in hearing about the songs themselves. I have this vague ambition that this could spark a larger discussion about songs and songwriting among the people (smarter than average, in my perhaps-biased opinion) who appreciate my songs. I think that would be pretty cool. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't. But it's worth a shot.

At this point, the only way to get the CD is to come to the shows, though we might do more of this sort of thing if the experiment yields anything interesting. In the meantime, here's the address for feedback.

Thanks. And see you at the show. With any luck.
yours/Dr. Frank