THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “So… I went back to my piano (the same piano I wrote almost the entire Letters album on almost 20 years ago), where sometimes there’s just an inherent emotion that comes with that particular instrument when I sit down to play it. I had no ideas. No songs. No words, really. So I just sat and played whatever my fingers guided me to.
I know…. Sounds pretty hippy-dippy of me. But between reaching for all of my rock ’n’ roll piano balladeer muses of my youth while driving or motorcycling, and feeling a common thread of snarky humor with sad reality, I started a journey for this new crop of songs.
A theme will sometimes pop up when I start to culminate lyrics while writing records (yes, yes including that rock opera record awhile back), and I couldn’t help but feel a theme of someone choosing the life of a bar singer (it’s my night shift when I am not in the studio making music by day).
It’s a great gig, don’t get me wrong. But when you’ve done it for this many years, the ups and downs of it… The countless nights of maybe playing to a packed room one night, then playing the next night in another town to just the bartender. The bar fights from jackasses that take the spotlight when you’re playing your best song. Or doing a show so good OR so bad that it makes you cry after. You can see how it can feel like a drug. The lows are low as fuck. The highs are pretty good. Either way, it’s a bizarre choice for a so-called “career.”
Reflecting on all of this, I said to myself, ‘OK … you haven’t really written a record that feels like a soundtrack to all the rock balladeer bar singers out there … and you know you wanna.’
I should probably give this album about a bar singer a name, right? Why? Because like a promising young singer from New Jersey once said, ‘I’m just tired and bored with myself.’ In this case, I chose my middle name, after my great uncle that i never knew, but I heard was a real character.
Please silence your cell phones. Ladies and gentleman, a warm welcome for … Glenn.”
