(I'd be remiss if I didn't thank Eric for giving my songs an outlet, and Phillip for doing the heavy lifting of getting them onto the site. Thanks guys!)

If I had to pick one tune that's on the Blogcritics' Radio page I'm the most proud of, I'd have to say it's "Dreamer's Alibi", which began as single vocal track sung a cappella by Nicole Vilencia in my den back in January of 2003. Through a healthy amount of trial and error, (and all sorts of cutting and pasting in the Sonar home recording program), I built the music up underneath her vocal, which I then had her rerecord after everything was done to better match the music. Just in case anyone reading this is also into home recording, here's a "blueprint" of how the song came together. It's a pretty fair example of how technically advanced home recording has gotten in the last twenty years. The recording of this song is as complex as anything that could be attempted by a rock group in a commercial studio--except that in this case, it was recorded on a PC in my den.

Plotting Out The Song

I began by listening very, very carefully to what Nicole had recorded. Her lyrics, melody and performance seemed to me that the song should be a real power ballad, with a fair amount of instrumentation--maybe a high-tech interpretation of a vaguely early-1970s Delaney and Bonnie sort of sound. So with that in mind, I began to first craft guitar parts to fit her melodies, after I laid down some Acid drum loops to set the tempo.

I ended up using several of my electric guitars under her voice. The clean sounding electric on the instrumental fade-in is my Fender Telecaster. Under the verses and the bridge, it's my Fender Stratocaster, and on the choruses, it's the Strat and my Gibson ES-335TD-12 electric 12-string. To through the kitchen sink into the mix, I played a few lead licks on my Gibson Les Paul Custom on the last chorus as well. While the rest of the song is in the key of D, I modulated the choruses up to E to take advantage of the ringing open E and B strings on the electric 12-string, a trick Jimmy Page used on "Four Sticks" from Led Zeppelin IV.

The flute solo on the introduction was a sample from the Reason synthesizer program that I improvised in the D-mixolydian mode. I had been watching the DVD of Standing In The Shadows of Motown while I was working on the song, and was trying to get some of James Jamerson's fluidity into the bass parts, which is why it's also improvising away under the introduction before settling down on the verses. (While I own a Fender Precision Bass, the bass on the recording is a SoundFont loaded into one of the virtual synthesizers in Reason, so that I can more easily craft it to match the music on top of it. Long story, but I've used tons of synthesized bass ever since my first synthesizer back in the mid-1980s.)