There's a spot on the highway out of town where the everyday ends and the road begins. It's usually about a quarter of a tank into the trip. For some of us it's been better than 25 years since we drove past that spot without John Stewart along for the ride. His songs and long highways are inextricably bound up with big chunks of our lives and memories. It's a little hard to explain, but he has always given us a lot more than just sounds to fill driving time...the songs have become part of the experience. They have somehow made the trips a little truer...a little richer. There's been some sort of exchange between us in that special environment...rolling through America...

The sound of fat tires hitting the expansion joints is different when your shaving gear or makeup is in a bag in the trunk, along with some old jeans and a spare pair of boots. As that flap-splat rhythm picks up, and the numbers grow on the speed limit signs, a lot of us find our everyday lists fading away. Here on the Northern Plains, we joke that the real trip begins at the third horse outside of town. That's about where your car eases into "big dog" mode and you re-adjust the seat and sometimes you can actually feel something lift up off your shoulders. The light can take on a different quality. Your thoughts are a little clearer. Your sense of possibilities wakes up and rolls the windows down a tad...and the music up a little...

John Stewart knows these things. Read the liner notes: "You've got to listen to music when you drive; it's in the constitution." He has chosen twelve songs from the hundreds, tweaked them a little, mixed some truth into the spaces between the carefully ordered tracks and then quietly offered us an album to slide in right about the time we start looking for that fourth horse. "I've put this collection together of some of my songs that may do it for you."

It did it for us.

But note the title. If you are looking for 12 John Stewart songs to play while steering your car at a high rate of speed, this isn't it. You could make a compilation like that, with "Bring It On Home" and "Swift Lizard" and "18 Wheels" and a lot of others, and just about guarantee yourself a speeding ticket or two. Instead, he has laid out a sequence for driving...for remembering and sorting and figuring things out in that special environment with windows and an engine and "...the towns or countryside slowly gliding past my window." And he put "Wheels of Thunder" and "18 Wheels" in there as if to remind you what he can do to your throttle foot...

This ride starts in the early '80s and tells us right up front—with the first track—that this is going to be about more than just traveling somewhere. There are some ten and twenty-year jumps between the tracks, but the flow of music and insight is so smooth you won't really notice. Everyone will find their own gifts. The mix is that rich.

If you don't know these songs, there is an experience waiting for you here that is just plain enviable. And if you do know them, it is just about guaranteed you will find some surprising things that have been hiding in there all these years, waiting for you and this special "artist's cut."

If you are a fledgling John Stewart fan, is this a good addition to a growing collection? Yes. It will deepen your awareness of just how much this man likes and respects you. It will lead you to the classic and neglected albums like Trancas and The Secret Tapes. It will surely fuel your fondness and appreciation for the artist. It will take you for a very personal ride down your next long highway and show you what we mean by an exchange, because this is two-way media, not just road fill.

If you are a full-blown John Stewart FAN, do you want this one? Definitely. And you will know it from the first note of the first song, because when you hear the opening of "It Ain't the Gold," you'll know that, once again, the Plainspoken Poet has laid one out just for you, and this trip is going to be about journeys in every sense...not just getting somewhere in a car.

This one is very special.

The 2003 CD release of Songs to Drive By is now out-of-print.

This is a deceptively small album. It has a huge "backstory."

In 2003, the rest of the country finally caught up to the place John Stewart started—the paddocks and stalls and hot-walking circles of California race tracks.

He grew up in the working areas of horse tracks in California, where his father was a trainer. The images and rhythms of harness and thoroughbred racing have informed his music from the first album on these shelves to this most recent. Horses have played both a real and symbolic role in his lyrics—from Sweetheart on Parade in "Mother Country" through Secretariat in "Let the Big Horse Run" to the epic combination of "Wild Horse Road/All the Brave Horses." Equine references have brought depth to the brush strokes of his lyrics from the horseman in "Ride Stone Blind," all of whose friends "seem to live outside the law," to the "hard living bunch...sleeping in the tack room" in "Hard Times For the Monkey Boy." 

In 2002, people began passing Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit from hand to hand. It was so good that you found a friend who hadn't read it and gave it to them— knowing it would never return because they were going to do exactly the same thing. At the time someone said, "This lady has done, in 560 pages, what John Stewart does in four minutes." And they were right.

The book was like a John Stewart song with almost all the details filled in and the themes expanded from a snapshot to a small diorama. It had self-made men, strong women, everyday heroes... and they all revolved around an unlikely, under-sized, strong-willed, damaged horse with an awkward gait, a sly attitude and the heart of a giant. It was history from the bottom up—the stories of people who aren't usually in books—written so well you could smell the scenes. Around here, it was like a vindication of our goal and point of view. We loved it.

Then they made the movie.

At the end of the film people stood up and applauded in theatres all over the country. Underdogs became the topic of conversations over beer... and coffee... and cocktails and canapés... Horatio Alger went to the races and everybody got it. This real story of two- and four-legged losers and outsiders emerging from tragedy, abuse, and misunderstanding to fight for a dream—in the bright sunlight of public view and with little besides stubbornness and courage—touched places some of us had forgotten.

We heard that John Stewart saw it seven times. And it's as if he realized that the hero of the book had been moved to the periphery of the movie. The unfocused people whose lives came clear in Hillenbrand's words, with Seabiscuit as the lens, had somehow taken over the story. It's as if the muses whispered in his ear and ushered him to that terrible, wonderful and lonely place where the creators of great art must work. "Tanforan," they must have murmured to him... What happened next is pure Stewart.

He let a mix of his biggest fans and total strangers listen in as he brought his mind and his voice and his hands and his history into the creative fight to fill an empty place in the world with a six-minute epic in music and verse. "Tanforan" put the horse back as the lens for a dense mix of mystery and metaphor that only this plainspoken poet could create. 

Each August, in Scottsdale, Arizona, he hosts a fantasy camp for amateur folk singers who get to be the third member of a group with 2/3 of the 1960s Kingston Trio...he and Nick Reynolds. The audience is drawn from the 500-member-plus, on-line "family" called Bloodlines that has formed around his solo career, together with their guests and the general public. 

He sang the song on two consecutive nights, from handmade charts on a music stand, sharing its evolution and changing form. He let people see into that private and perilous space where art becomes real. He trusted others with this child of his craft at its most fragile. In his spoken introductions, he talked about his memories of mucking out stalls and walking horses to cool them down safely, and of the care given to a boy by the "rough guys" of the horse world. He did it under spotlights, standing alone.

From Arizona, he went into a studio and layered the sound, adding a banjo track (among others) so delicate that it sneaks up on your ear and then sticks around after the song is over. Then, without a pause, he took it out on the road—sharing that solo studio mix on homemade CDs with audiences on an East Coast tour—and playing the song toward maturity over the sound of dart-board competitions and dinner orders....under spotlights, standing alone.

And while he was closing circles and starting themes back around them again, he revisited songs reaching all the way back to the first solo album—California Bloodlines—and recast them for today. The last eight tracks on the album are some of the finest (and most carefully engineered) live performances in years, featuring Dave Batti, Dennis Kenmore and John Hoke in support of Stewart's artistry. A few months ago most of us would have argued vehemently that there was no way that songs like "July You're a Woman" and "Wind on the River" could ever be improved from their original form. Now?? They're classics this way, too. If these live tracks whet your appetite for more, you can also get them (with the exception of "July...") in their complete concert setting on Dark 30, the next album below.

The sequencing of this album is superb. It flows like spiced honey from one track to another—as you're led gently through a landscape that lets you pick your own point of view—and builds steadily until "One-Eyed Joe" knocks you out of your chair. The song, in this live version, is a giant ending to a terrific album. Around here, we're having trouble hearing it without seeing John Cash leaned forward in his chair, with that crooked grin of his, keeping time...somewhere up the valley.

So that's where Tanforan—the song and the album—is right now...a work in progress. Together with an inside joke for his Bloodliner "family" that can be enjoyed by anyone, and eight live performances from earlier in 2003 that show us what he's been thinking about some of the classic songs from the early years of his career. They're also "works in progress." 

So are we.

And some of us can hardly wait for the next long letter...

The songs:

1.   Tanforan
2.   Art Faller's Land
3.   July, You're a Woman (Ballad)
4.   Moonlight Dream
5.   China Sky
6.   Wind on the River
7.   It Ain't the Gold
8.   Renegade Rising
9.   Dreamers on the Rise
10. One-Eyed Joe "Live"

The 2003 CD release of Tanforan is now out-of-print.

There are now at least three, absolutely and unarguably classic, live albums by John Stewart with a backing band.

In 1974, it was The Phoenix Concerts Live. 1990 brought us Neon Beach Live. And 2004 is the year of Dark 30 (Live). Yes, it's that good.

Make no mistake. The albums from John Stewart's solo concerts are extraordinary, and the live albums with his long-time friend Dave Batti on bass are priceless for their nuance and depth. But every once in a while what we really want to do is load a live one up, warn the neighbors, find the sweet spot between the speakers, get into a position that's good for an hour or so, crank the volume up to nine and just get blown away by Stewart and the "big" group. If you are the same, this is the one you have been awaiting.

Use an easy chair. This is 21 tracks in 99 nearly-seamless minutes and you will not want to miss a second.

Once again, Stewart has given careful thought to his fans and listeners. He had at least 14 tracks from this concert that had not been released in any form. He had some that had been released with slightly different tweaks on Tanforan and other works in progress. He could easily have put out a 12 or 14 track CD of just the unreleased material at the normal price, and without a lot of extra work on production. Instead, he gave us what we would have wanted if given a choice—nearly the complete show on TWO disks. And for a few dollars more than a single disk issue.

Great decision! 

Comparisons are tricky, but this double CD has been played nearly non-stop around here for quite a while, and the non-Stewart reference it most brings to mind for some of us is the Allen Lomax field recordings from the '30s and '40s, when some of the most important things in American music were happening on front porches and in little bars and clubs...away from the Major Media Trends of THAT day. Oh, sure, the sound of Dark 30 is modern and huge and the fidelity is incredible, but it has that same sort of timeless and essential and irreducible quality.

It also has that same intimate feel...as if this cool guy in faded jeans got some of his friends to knock off hauling stumps (or maybe teaching kids?) and play some things they do at Saturday-night dances and some stuff they do 'cuz they like it...and when the kid from out of state turns on the recording device, they proceed to effortlessly JUST FLAT LAY IT DOWN. And when you listen to it a week or a decade later, you know they were grinnin' at each other, because there are so many layers and references and truths and jokes and tears pouring into the microphone that some folks will never be able to figure it out...even though they should---and nobody who wasn't there will ever get to the bottom of it all...

It is nothing less than an instant classic. It is the tiniest of steps away from actually being at the show. It is an extraordinarily clear, clean and crisp live recording...and that is probably an understatement. It is four long-time friends bringing everything they have to the table and betting it all as a group. It is folk, and blues, and jazz and something indefinable— featuring extended instrumental passages where you can actually hear the delicate conversations between their instruments—but pure.

Once again, Stewart, Kenmore, Batti (and John Hoke this time) have somehow called the lightning down—to sit in...

If you are not a John Stewart fan yet, this is a terrific place to start. This album and Havana offer you a small, clear window into where the long, sleek fast-freight train of Stewart's live and studio music is at this moment. And you are in the enviable position of being able to go back 35 years to the toasty caboose at the other end, work forward, and meet yourself in the middle. What a wonder. What a ride!

Like Neon Beach, this is PFM....the real stuff.

Again... 

The songs: 

Disc One
1.   Jimmy Duke's Intro
2.   Road Shines Bright
3.   Renegade Rising
4.   It Ain't the Gold
5.   Cowboy Intro
6.   Cowboy in the Distance
7.   Who Stole the Soul of Johnny Dreams
8.   China Sky
9.   Sweet Dreams
10. Lucky Old Sun
11. Dreamers on the Rise
12. Daydream Believer

Disc Two
1.   One-Eyed Joe
2.   Moonlight Dream
3.   Heart of a Kid
4.   Summer Child
5.   Wind on the River
6.   Waltz of the Crazy Moon
7.   Fire in the Wind/Gimme Shelter Medley
8.   Lost Her in the Sun
9.   Midnight Special/Cotton Fields/Strange Rivers Medley

"...And we will hide for forty years, if that's what's meant to be, meant to be..."  (John Stewart, 1963)

Fans of John Stewart often share a deep appreciation of the metaphor and innuendo in his work, the layered meanings in words and notes both sung and silent. This new album has veins of understanding, affirmation and empathy running down through so many strata that each listening brings new insights and meanings.

And we've listened to it a lot.

The Day the River Sang is the most completely realized, unified and coherent "major release" of his work in a very long time, and there have been some simply terrific albums in these forty-plus years. Some of the favorable comparisons around here go all the way back to 1969.

It was like finding a package out on the railing under the mailbox, wrapped in brown paper so heavy and stiff that it fought its folds and tapings until it fell away to reveal the velvet glow of rubbed cedar...dovetailed joins at the corners, fine brass hinges, a top fitted with such care that no latch was needed, and a faint smell of fine cigars... Inside, on top of something wrapped in tissue... another long letter from the friend who knows us so well, written and sketched on crisp parchment and tucked into an unsealed envelope of fine vellum. Notes and thoughts and a hand-drawn map of where we've been and what's ahead, the things we've forgotten and the things we've gained, and the precious nature of found and fashioned wisdom and humor and truths, lanterns in the dark.

Lift the tissue and find stories like rough agates exposed by time, chosen for harmony of size and the clarity of contrast, face-polished by hand and linked, not into a single strand, but an irregular mesh of fine and golden connections that hangs like a veil, open at the edges.

There's nothing forced in the telling. The truths are for the taking. The latitude and longitude of the trails marked here are the care taken between old friends and the respect given between those who have come the long way through the rough terrain life serves up.

We're all survivors here, friends. Oh sure, there are some to whom it is given to dance through life. For a lot of the rest of us, it's a hike through broken country on a faint and winding trail, tump line tugging at a head full of times.

Sometimes we survive on transient beauty, pale tracings in a petal, the flash of a hawk. And the music we hear in our heads when picking a way across broken scree is essential to the becoming that's probably the point of it all. There are also crystalline moments, with a whisper in the breeze, urging you to drop your guard and open your senses and see your friends and fellow travelers in profile against the light curving over the horizon west.

Once in a while, you file onto a grassy shelf tucked into the climb, an hour after twilight and a day into your canteen, and there's the glow of a fire laid down by a craggy scout who found the way and marked it in time with rhythms he was the first to hear.

Some of the very best of those soft, glowing swails have always been discovered on the remarkable geography of that island of music that flies the flag of Stewart.

The Day the River Sang is one of the most special yet.

So drop your rucksack, lean back against your roll, put your scarred boots toward the fire and listen to the care in the crafting and production, the exquisite economy of the arrangements, with everything needed there and everything else polished away, as you realize that the guy on the log across the way, the one polishing something with oil and rouge and an ancient cloth, is the one who marked the way you've come. And there's the headstock of a Taylor just visible next to him, in the flickering light...

The Day the River Sang tells you right up front that the palette of experience and observation to be used in the album will be very wide, indeed. "Baby It's You" is a song for long-time lovers, those who have come out the other end of the toils and turmoils of ten or twenty or forty years of internal and external mutual geography, still holding hands. Stewart's opener tells us that it's more than a little all right to celebrate the nightingale dances where we began and the stars of tonight and the days between. The placement of this song at the head of this sequence, and the phrasing of the theme and title cannot be accidental. It certainly doesn't shut out listeners in their teens and twenties, quite the opposite. But, if you remember the Shirelles and 1961, the song plays out against a backdrop of memories as a tender tribute to ourselves as we were then, and the wonders earned since.

It's a heck of a song, one that, at the very first listen, will draw you into the experience that awaits in the twelve that follow. And that would be good enough for a lot of artists. It is uniquely Stewart, however, that there should be bandings laid down by the salts of time and tears, to be revealed as your first attention turns into the appreciation of familiarity, echoing its theme. A whole lot of us hear references to the chorus of "Lost Her in the Sun" in the instrumental opening, and, if they are in fact there, that can't be accidental either. That's how thinly the razors of time and chance have parsed our lives, in so many cases. Is this the story of a guy who got up two hours earlier on that day, and said the things and then kept the promises made, so that she "never said goodbye..." because she never left?

How many artists care enough, and have cared long enough, about the listener to even have you wondering?

Every song brings something new and surprising to the table. The production is crisp, thoughtful and delicately layered. Listen to the different messages in the harmonica passages played by Stewart and those of Henry Diltz. Listen to the way Dave Batti's bass has been pulled forward in the front-to-back mix in some of these songs, to let it sing its own song right alongside the keyboards of John Hoke. Listen to the bite and grit and moods in Stewart's voice as it continues to become one of those uniquely "American" instruments. Listen to the transformation of "East of Denver" as the sweetness of the voices of Keena and Bianca Batti, Penney Roberts and Kate Wallace are set against Stewart's differing delivery of the verses and the choruses.

Stewart and Batti and Hoke and Diltz and all the others who have contributed to this project have been wrapped by the production and engineering in an extraordinarily intimate way. These are not session musicians brought in for a job. These are old friends being given the chance to bring that one, perfect note or passage into the mix like glowing candles built on a score of stages, in a whirl of towns. Everything here is essential. Nothing is superfluous. And we've finally got Dave Batti playing accordion on an album.

There are some thoughts about some of the songs below, but this album is so richly textured that you will surely find your own meanings and memories and favorites as it unfolds. If you are already a fan, you already know that the center of the glowing lapidary of Stewart's music is always left for you to fill. So much of music now is arithmetic. Stewart's work is a geometry of sharing, built in the firelit spaces between the artist and the listener. And if you are just coming to that place? What a wonderful beginning to the journeys to come! 

In "Midnight Train," twelve songs after those opening notes and references to 1961 (and 1979?), Stewart wraps it all back around with lyrics as contemporary as next week's news set next to 1955's Cadillacs hit "Speedo." If you're listening while driving (which is a terrific idea after the first sit-down with The Day the River Sang), the album never really ends, as the driving rhythm of the last song slides smoothly into "Slider" and back around to "Baby It's You." And the reference to "the moon on the hood" and the use of "Cadillac" as a street name tell you once again that the brittle plastic container you opened to receive these gifts really is a whole lot more like that old, hand-rubbed cigar box.

Or is it all just accident and happenstance? Well, it really wouldn't matter if it was, but around these parts we don't think so. John Stewart has been doing this same thing down all the years since the lines from "Run the Ridges" where we began. (And the placement of this up-gunned version of that song as the fifth on the album, between the title track and the completely realized performance of "New Orleans," cannot be random either, friends.) There's not one artist in a thousand who cares enough about us to layer their art this deeply, to wrap their love of us in care this delicate and respectful of the things we each bring to exchanges of the heart.

It's simply not right that this "one-in-thousands" artist has hidden in plain sight for so much of the fifty years since Earl "Speedo" Carroll's nickname was entered into the lexicon of American Music by Esther Navarro (or so the story goes), near the time of Stewart's sixteenth birthday.

But then, you don't often see the scouts, do you?

Grab the chance when you get it.

Find a quiet time, shut off the world in your head and the telephone, think about those flickering flames and the presence of legend, put The Day the River Sang on the big speakers, but at about medium volume and listen to the whole thing through. Then take a walk before you cue it up again, because there is a nearly irresistible tendency to go into total immersion.

Who else gives you that?

The songs: 

1.   Baby, It's You
2.   Jasmine

There was a hunger once for the magical happenstance found somewhere out beyond a car hood opened at every stop, if luck and a far nighttime came together. You didn't have to know what you were looking for to know when it had been found, out there on the fine, hard edges of risk and sunset on a new horizon. Is this song permission to turn away from unlocking that driver's door and to ease instead up a street in the dusk to find the closer mysteries in the fragrant hollows of home? Could be...

3.   East of Denver
4.   The Day the River Sang

Forty or fifty years of hope and truth and promise in four minutes, and it will mean something different to every listener. Enough said.

5.   Run the Ridges
6.   New Orleans

Songs about flood and storm have found their way into our music all the way back into the Twenties and before, when artists like Charlie Patton and Willie Brown took the dirt roads and railbeds north into the Paramount studios in Wisconsin and recorded "High Water Everywhere," and so many others. Some of us once thought Randy Newman had taken that musical thread as far as it could go. But has it ever been so wistful as this, turned in the hands and words and notes of John and Buffy Stewart? Where others may have tried to capture the storms of 2005 on the gulf in bold oils and broad brushstrokes, this is a watercolor, trusting the listener to bring themselves to the experience and sense the colors and meanings at the edges of the wash.

7.   Golden Gate Fields
8.   Amanda Won't Dance

Some of us heard this live on two nights in Scottsdale in August of 2005, and woke up with it stuck in our head for months after. It's a song with a twinkle in its eye and a finger laid alongside its nose, wise and fun and just a little bit on the sly side. Or maybe that's us, if given a tad bit of encouragement and permission...

9.   Sister Mercy
10. Broken Roses (Weathered Dreams)

We probably all have encountered a rose pressed into a book somewhere so far into someone's past that some of the petals have turned into dust, and the stem has split. But have you ever noticed that there will often be one undamaged petal and a bit of the scent, just waiting to be found? Dreams and memories can be like that. You might think you've put them away, and then find out that down the years that followed they were out there in front of you the whole time, taking the force of the tumult and the grit, losing the nonessential soft parts until the veins of the things that have held you together are exposed and shine. Waiting to be found again...

11. Naked Angel on a Star-Crossed Train
12. Midnight Train
13. Slider Stuck Her Hand in a Rainbow

This one may slip right past you on the first listen and then nail you to the floor somewhere down the line. Thanks to John Stewart, some of us have had the non sequiturial dazzlement of spending a little time with Julie Krone, who turns everything you thought you knew about bravery and the size of the human heart upside down in ways that defy anything except delight. Well, Julie had this dream, and she shared it with John... Anyway. Give yourself a chance to absorb the lyrics and then, really listen to the instrumentation, arrangement, production and engineering. Oh Sweet Martha...

[With heartfelt gratitude for the help in the writing from Tom Barrett, Paul Rybolt, Jo Otto, Bert Wiest, Annie O'Keefe and all the kids in the treehouse...]

The Piano Album


2008 Neon Dreams release
Produced by John Stewart
Mastering by Jeff McDonald and Justin Zellers

 (Image is from the CD cover insert, photo by Henry Diltz)

For some of us, the ride across the last forty years or so has had its own sound track, and memories will erupt if we stumble on music as disparate (and occasionally silly) as Raydio and Quincy Jones, scanning radio bands, stuck in traffic, or getting ambushed by satellite stations.

You can tell the real die-hards. There will be at least one functioning turntable and an LP collection indexed in an idiosyncratic way. Sometimes the amplifier will have tubes and the speakers will be a lot bigger than a loaf of bread. The system to play CDs will either be separate, or will have been grafted onto the "real" sound system--the one for vinyl and cassettes. And there will be a series of personal compilations that start on cassettes and span the years onto CD media. The truly afflicted might just have a homemade 8-track or two...

Around here those compilations will have at least one of Stewart's songs, and, more often, two or three, reflecting his recordings most recent at the time of compiling and in the reproduction format available in the car owned at the time. Sometimes you needed a mix for the miles ahead, and at other times it had to be pure John Stewart, but he was always there.

The timing was so often perfect. Stewart would be running ahead of us a few years, and writing about the things he was seeing. By the time the recordings had caught up--been made and been distributed-- we'd be hitting many of the same spots and crossings. We were never quite alone. He had scouted the way and left markers to guide us through. And so much of his material was timeless that you could always dial back to 1969 or whenever and find what you needed to get through a day or two in the eighties or nineties.

Whatever else might be happening in your world, though, you could always count on the fact that there would be a new album from him in a year or two or four. It didn't take that long to figure out that he was no more going to quit writing and recording than we were going to quit the moonlit roads of our own journeys.

After he took that one-way trail out ahead of us in January of 2008, it took a while for some of this to really sink in. If you've been taking the horizon for granted because it has always been there, it might not be obvious that somebody else's building or the lights of the place you are living have taken away the last bit of that long view or the span of the stars and quiet.

It turns out that John Stewart had been providing for us, same as always. We had slowly come to realize that he had written songs with a frequency the rest of us reserve for visits to the drive-through. There had accumulated a collection of demos, alternates and live performances that was staggering, and the one person most ideally suited to maintaining this archive was the same one who had followed Stewart's career most fully and written about it most compellingly--Tom DeLisle.

The Piano Album is the first "new" album to issue from that treasure trove. Neon Dreams, Stewart's private label, is the publisher. The extensive liner notes could have been written by no one but DeLisle. The 10 tracks are from the time immediately before Fire in the Wind, in the mid-1970s, the art is from Henry Diltz, and the remastering is by Jeff McDonald and Justin Zellers at Sweetwater Productions in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The craft on display is stunning.

 And the back story is distinctively Stewart.

As Tom DeLisle writes in the liner notes:

"This collection, recorded in two days in November of 1976, came to be known -- by the very few who ever knew of its existence -- as The Piano Album, owing to the fact that John, because of financial restraints as much as creative expansion, played all the piano parts along with his normal acoustic guitar and vocal work. (A side note here: John had been much influenced in the early '70s by pianist and fellow songwriter Tom Waits, and took to writing some of his songs to piano accompaniment...)

"The irony, contributing to the miracle that is this Piano Album, is that Stewart finished its recording in record time, and hurried with a cassette tape to a scheduled late-afternoon meeting with a record label hotshot in downtown Los Angeles, hoping the exec would be impressed enough to sign John to a contract. After a full listen to all ten songs, with John nervously searching the man's face for reaction to the tunes, the guy handed the tape back to John and said "There's nothing here that interests me. Thanks for coming in, and have a nice Thanksgiving."

"I happened to be at Stewart's house above Malibu Road along that magnificent stretch of Southern California beach when he returned home that night after the rejection. He dejectedly went to toss the cassette in his kitchen trash when I stopped him and asked for the tape. "You really want this?" When I assured him I did, he flipped it to me, sarcastically adding, "Have a nice Thanksgiving."

"John's disappointment was my good fortune.  And now it's yours.   Had that tape been lost, this recording, and several of these songs, would  have gone forever unheard with it. I subsequently spent many a long and pleasant night sitting on the porch of my own place on that beach, often with the Santa Ana winds whipping the tops off the cascading waves, listening via headphones to these magic sounds. To this day, I cannot hear them without evoking the spell of the looming moon over the Pacific on those warm and windy nights, with the dramatic strains of "New Orleans" and the gorgeous "Virginia" and "Hand Your Heart to the Wind" taking me back once again."

Once again, the timing is perfect, bringing a spray of lights across the dark. This one is like hitting the scan button on your radio and somehow locking in to a signal from 30 years ago, carrying new songs from Stewart on a carrier wave of both familiarity and surprise.

Just as back then, the songs are dense with lyrical watercolors and new characters. Shots to the psyche drifting in like feathers... New Orleans before a different song with the same name, in the wash of a different storm. Angeles delivered so much more robustly and authentically than the "official" version on Blondes...and the rest of the story on Louie. Boston Lady with a roguish turn to the count-in and close (you are never going to hear the end of this song quite the same way again) and on and on through what might just be a reference to his fans left behind slipped into the first line of the last verse of the last song, and all the subtleties in the delivery by that voice, ferocious leads and bass lines, and PIANO??...

The re-mastering is superb. Gratitude is owed to Jeff and Justin. The art is masterful in that very special way that says "Henry Diltz" (heck, even the color in the hatband and the feather are perfect).

DeLisle's notes are as exceptional as ever, laying out the story for those who know and those who are discovering...

And there are a couple of these that beg to have a new road compilation built around them... 

The songs: 

1.   Hometown Girl
2.   New Orleans (Riding Home)
3.   Angeles
4.   Boston Lady
5.   Hide Where the Wind Can't Find Me
6.   Hand Your Heart to the Wind
7.   Virginia
8.   Zapata's Own Comrades
9.   18 Wheels
10. Auld Lang Syne

The Neon Dreams release of The Piano Album is now out-of-print.

A Neon Dreams Sampler

2009 Neon Dreams release
All songs written and produced by John Stewart
Album produced by Paul Rybolt

 (Image is from the CD cover insert, photo by John Stewart)

For nearly 40 years, John Stewart was out there ahead of us, marking life's blind curves and risky bridges, and the narrow places where sudden sprays of salt water could land us in the ditch. He gave us songs to guide us, save us and warn us that were somehow timeless. Always topical in his own way, still there is a remarkably small portion of his immense body of work that is tied to a time. "18 Wheels" and "Davey on the Internet" come to mind, but even they are so iconic as to somehow escape categorization as "dated."

And that was just on the albums that were published by "major" labels.

For a huge percentage of his fans, those were the only songs we knew. Out here in the far, open spaces there might be a rare personal appearance by Stewart somewhere, but it seemed as if we always heard about it a couple of weeks after it happened. Our relationship with the man was another step removed from the people who saw him, regularly, in concert. As the years rolled on and we prowled the record, and then CD racks awaiting a new album from him, the feeling grew that there had to be more. This guy was so good that he had to be writing more than three or four songs a year.

Boy, were we right.

There were hundreds of songs being preserved, in both a private depository and one that was a little more public. The first was the contents of "the box that ate Mount Clemens," a story touched on elsewhere in these pages and more fully told by Tom DeLisle in the liner notes for Wires from the Bunker. It was, and remains, a treasure trove of demos, concert recordings, alternate takes and private recordings. Most recently "the box" was the source of the original tapes for The Piano Album, noted just above.

The second was a largely underground river of Stewart's work, recorded in a variety of settings, but often in his home studio, and published on his own private labels, most often on Neon Dreams. The albums, tapes and CDs were for his fans. They were available at his concerts and to members of a couple of mailing lists. They rarely showed up in catalogues.

These recordings all appear here on the Stewart Shelves, intermixed with the "commercial" recordings. There are more than 20 of them, and the songs and performances they contain rival and often surpass any that appeared on the "major label" issues.

Perhaps more important, at least for those of us whose lifelines had come to contain Stewart songs like intricate macrame with semi-precious stones woven into the emerging texture, these private issues filled in the gaps of time when we were awaiting the appearance of his next album at our local music store. To put it another way, we found out that we had been operating with every other chapter of a survival manual, and somehow were given the missing ones.

Some of them would touch off retrospectives of our lives in the days of their recording, dovetailing so neatly into remembrance that it would be like black and white photos turned to fresh colors when we paged through photo albums long neglected. With others, it was as if they had been written for that very time in our experiences when we finally discovered them, no matter how long before he had penned them. And there were a few that turned out to have arrived from the past to blend with our chapters just beginning, before even we knew what was going on.

Who, other than Stewart, could do that?

This sampler of that material touches on eleven of the private issue albums. One could easily argue that different songs and different albums could have been included, but that would totally miss the point.

And that point is that this is a sampler, a quick taste of this mother lode of John Stewart's music that you might have missed. It offers hints of the richness this entire sub-catalogue contains and it does it very, very well.

If you are one of the many whose status as a fan was forged on the basis of his "commercial" releases only, this one is your introduction to a lot of the missing chapters from the manual that occasionally got us back out of the ditch and sometimes helped us fly. There are some others that live with Tom DeLisle, from TBTAMC. And still others live in the memories of his friends, like Henry Diltz and Chip Douglas. If you want those, you might want to search for "Bloodlines" or attend the annual reunion of his fans in Scottsdale, in August.