Arkansas Side

http://soundcloud.com/you/tracks  

Check out "Arkansas Side"....I wrote the lyrics after Jeff told me about going to visit Benny when he was in the hospital. He almost died...We wrote this back in June. We recorded this version last night..


keith

The Next Step

We are about to be digging in on the production. We have 20 songs...You have heard a few here and other places, you have heard them in their most raw stage. Some will stay that way, some won't. We are writing one more tomorrow night. Then we move on to the next step....Producing is like painting..We are picking up the brushes of sounds, beats, and barks.  ----keith

The song....

a couple a weeks ago I wrote about this tune...a dangerous tune... here it is...

http://www.facebook.com/w.keith.moore?ref=profile#!/thewineskins

Last night..

Last night, Renee' and I were sitting in the screened-in porch listening to the new tunes Jeff and I have been writing. Sipping on a clear drink, swinging in the swing. I have recorded a lot of music in my life, written a bunch of songs, but nothing has come my way like these songs. Being back with Jeff has created a landslide of poetry and melody. I sure hope a bunch of you folks out there get to hear this music. But somehow that is out of our hands..we will put it out and do our limited things we can do to get it to you, but really it is up to timing, placement, luck, God, the wind, and the "right" efforts...hard work. We want you to discover us.. we want to be your band.

The album will be called "Benny," -- a guy who is Jeff's and my dear friend and was once a fellow Wineskin..It is somehow about Benny, but not really..because Benny represents all of us. The true "everyman"...born in the deep south, raised in the confusing bewildering families we are all given, a drunk, sober, kind hearted, lost, unable to break the chain, able to break the chain..funny as hell, sad as hades, trying to live as best he can...and often failing...loves deeply, loved deeply..confused, frustrated, curious, almost tasting lasting happiness, all of us.--keith

Rattle My Faith

I was home in Oxford this past Friday. I had just finished "A Miracle of Catfish" by Larry Brown, the last thing he wrote before he left this "Impossible Beauty". My cell phone vibrated and I saw it was Jeff calling. He tells me an idea about the idea of faith. About how an undamaged confident faith is not really a faith that holds much water. Something to that affect.. I already knew the lyric..I rushed to the computer and tried to keep up with the words appearing on the screen. I sent it to Jeff within minutes of his call and he responded with excitement as to another song landing on our window seal . It's a dangerous song to be sure.

Last night I arrived at Jeff's office on Music Row and he was waiting outside. Usually when I get there Jeff is wanting to stand out back of the house for a few minutes, unwind, and sip a beer. His routine becomes my routine and we relax and talk about life in general. Not last night! When I got out of my car he said, "I've got to show you the music I came up with for "Rattle My Faith" right now! As he started playing the beautiful chords and showed me the haunting melody, I knew the song as if we had played it a hundred times..Within 5 minutes of sitting down we recorded the song. When you dear folks hear this song, you will hear that moment..you will hear that vibe of that song being born. It all went down at once.--keith

Mississippi Will

I was thinking tonight about the first song we wrote when we got back together this past June. It was June 5, 2011....I had been back in Nashville part time for 1 year. I had almost given up on trying to find you..On June 1 I went to the old building where we used to write. You were gone..I ran in to Ronnie as I was leaving, whom I haven't seen in 11 years, and he told me where you were. We set up a meeting and the day we were to meet I sent you the lyric, "Mississippi Will"..You came up with the basic melody and we wrote it that night.. That was a good sign..Keith

Pablo YEA!

The sounds of Pablo's farm that day inspired us to no end! The goats, horses, chickens, birds, Roosters..And Pablo's passion for his art. He uses the red clay soil we grew up in to make the finest pottery. Our songs must be adorned with the sounds we have "dug" out of the ground as Pablo dug every brick out of the ground for his Kiln. As we drove back to Nashville that Sunday, the song formed among us as we drove down the road.."Be like Pablo, be like Pablo, be like Pablo YEA!" This is going to be a blast to create together. Can't wait to play it for Pablo! --Keith

Pablo, the Spanish conqueror

You know we're going to have to put this song, Pablo, together the way he would do it. We'll take...instead of old bricks, we'll take sounds, like Pablo fetches a bottle or a stone from the ditch like a beggar, we'll collect all the thrown away sounds. Well use them to create a symphony. I'm going to loop the crickets we recorded at his house. And perhaps we should, instead of using horns or any other conventional instruments, we should use the towboat whistle we recorded. I can change the pitch and we can play it like a keyboard on different tracks to make chords. We could even do that with the sound of Pablo's horse. It's only fitting that we figure out how to finish our tribute to him using only the sounds that are out there, lying around collecting dust, nobody much cares about. Jeff

A Place to Put My Fear

Are lions truly courageous? Is it a thing of merit to be at the top of the
food chain? Perhaps the short answer is yes. Will a buzzard eat a dead
buzzard? There’s one in the road that runs beside my house, road kill’s
road kill. Or so I assume, the middle of the road would be an odd place to
die of old age. I’ve been keeping an eye on him and so far the answer is
no. I’ve been so humane to my dog he’s almost human and even though Orwell
warned about it, I rooted for the red army, not because they were right,
but because I miss my enemy and a place to put my fear.
Jeff
9/11/11

Scary

Last night we wrote a new tune called "Look up at the Stars"...I think it may be the best song we've written so far..The simplicity and sparse approach came upon us like a dream. We played it one time..and this is what you will hear on the album..or as a single song we release.  Jeff and I are stumbling upon something with how we are writing and recording this stuff...it is all about capturing the moment the song is written in. It is scary and incredibly enjoyable.--keith

Groovy Bugs

Jeff and I spent a lot of time recording bugs. Jeff is turning into a mad scientist of bug sounds. Not only does Jeff come up with some amazingly beautiful melodies, he is truly a talented guitarist and producer,,,and now I should add, a kind of Bug Whisperer. He has his creatures now..his sounds we recorded over two days in Mississippi..... I believe Mississippi bugs know and are proud of their roots. They make their sounds with an accent unlike the accents of other southern states. They make a deeply melancholic music with a 70's groove, a purely analog tone, rich with grit and romance. These Mississippi bugs have refused to lose their soul to digital. I find that very refreshing. They were happy when Jeff told them we were releasing the album on vinyl.  They groove differently than Tennessee bugs for sure..Tennessee bugs are more structured and business like..not Mississippi bugs. Take my word for it. Jeff recorded long moments of these southern singing creatures. We are going to employ them in the making of our new album. I even saw him getting a mailing address from one strange looking bug to send royalty checks once the record "takes off". He recorded this too. I would play it for you but the bug insisted on privacy..sorry.---keith

The Morons of Oxy

The Wineskins

The first time we played live a big fat guy came up from the back of the
club and turned the juke box on. He stood there with a pool cue in his
hand staring right at us. Then our drummer jumped off the stage and
started beating the crap out of him. Or he would have I guess, if we’d had
a drummer. But we didn’t, we had two acoustic guitars and a mandolin. So
we just kept on playing, miming to a really loud version of Alabama’s
“Whisper To Me Softly”. It was kind of sad.

A year later we got a better gig at a club overlooking the Cumberland
River in downtown Nashville. The club owner was a skinny old hippie that
wouldn’t allow any amps or electric instruments. So we added the biggest
ones we could find, cello and string bass. The next thing you know we were
up and running, thumping away to a packed house every weekend. We would
practice and write songs during the week and then do our show on the
weekend. The Wineskins had arrived.

Any musician in Nashville will tell you that supply is way ahead of
demand. It’s always been that way. Thus getting a descent live gig is
tough if not impossible, but recording……….well now that’s a different
story. We had access to the best studios, engineers and players, and
quickly we began to learn how to capture the acoustic sound of The
Wineskins.

To us though, success meant getting a record deal, and we put a lot of our
energy into courting various labels and management companies. That’s when
it started to suck. Nashville can be one of the worst places to develop as
an artist, because you’re always in the shadow of the music industry, and
industry and art is an oxymoron. So we changed our name to The Morons of
Oxy (not really) and we fizzled, we flopped, we despaired, we moved back
to Mississippi.

But still, the founders of the band, the guys that once mimed to a juke
box, kept writing, and writing, and writing and eventually something
happened, an epiphany. We began to write songs because we had something to
say. It sounds simple, but it can be one of the most difficult things for
an artist to remember, to tell the truth, to use your talent as an
expression, to heal yourself with the things that you create. The world is
cluttered with good, but everything great is made this way.....Jeff

The Dogs

I pulled into Oxford last night about 9:00..my beautiful wife was waiting with a glass of wine in each hand..my dogs ran as fast as they could throuh the yard, happy that I was home. Ain't nothing like coming home. Nothing like being loved. It's like a miracle.

Jeff and I wrote two new songs this week. "Benny" and "Be Like Pablo".. songs inspired by our journey last weekend through this haunted place called Mississippi..Home.

I played the songs for wife this morning....she loved them.

wkm