In the last blog post, I wrote about how the album still lives and the new Better Day album I’ve just released will be a case in point. I decided back in late summer 2018 that I would create an album of all positive songs and call it Better Day. This was a year before I would hold the actual album in my hands. Now I was gearing up to go into the studio in early Fall 2018 to start recording the material that would become Better Day.

I had started the year by deciding to finish writing 2 songs that were “sitting in the can” as it were, meaning I had recorded the basic tracks for them during previous projects and never finished them. One had been “sitting in the can” for 9 years and the other one for 6 years! It was finally time to get down to finishing each one and then recording them later in the year.

The 1^st song that I finished writing from 2009 was called The Wish and the other one from 2012 was called Love Light. I had put the rough mixes from the studio sessions on my 8-Tk digital recorder so that I could record vocals and guitar parts and get a demo for each song. Soon I added demos of 2 other songs, Better Day and Modern Ways. I was so happy with the results that I booked time for the end of September to record them.

It had been 7 years since my last photoshoot and I knew this was the time for new photos. I was supposed to have a photoshoot in August with LA photographer Mark Maryanovich but it had been canceled due to a week of constant rain. Mark called me a couple of weeks later and said he would be in NYC the 2^nd week of September and we should book a session. This turned out to be a stroke of luck as the weather was now 20 degrees cooler than back in August and with the studio already booked for the end of the month, this would allow me to get in the proper frame of mind as an artist.

Mark had asked me to scout out some locations for the shoot. He said he was looking for a kind of gritty street vibe, or something like that. I had recently seen a video that Bruce Engler had done using the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a shot at the end of the video that had the bridge in the background and I sent it to Mark to see what he thought of the location. Mark loved it and said it was perfect for what he wanted to do with me.

Bruce said there was a warehouse area on the Brooklyn side under the bridge. This seemed like the logical place to start with Mark. So a week later I got up with my wife Barbara at 3am on a Saturday morning to meet Mark and his wife Carolyne down at the Circle Line on the West Side Highway in Manhattan so we could get over the Brooklyn Bridge at 5am because Mark wanted to shoot with his light setup. The area under the Brooklyn Bridge would turn out to be a better location than expected for a photoshoot.

Not only was there a warehouse that was lit up at night, but once you walked around a small bird sanctuary with trees and bushes blocking the view, there was a small park and Jane’s Carousel, glass-enclosed and all lit up with the East River rolling by. We worked for over 2 hours as the dawn broke in a light misty rain. We left about 7:15am back over the bridge to our 2^nd location in lower Manhattan.

I had picked the Wall St. area because I knew it had some of the oldest bars & cafes in the city. There was one area where 2 streets crossed by Del Monicos but it was Saturday and that’s trash day. The streets were filled with black trash bags piled all over the place. We needed to find another location. As luck would have it, we had passed a cobblestone street, appropriately called Stone Street, as we made our way up to the 1^st location. With all the streets being 1-ways, we circled back around to find Stone Street.

I pulled in front of the oldest café in NYC on the corner of Stone Street so Mark and his wife Carolyne could get out and scout the location. About 10 minutes later Mark came running back and motioned me to get out and follow him. I walked down the cobblestones to the middle of the block where Mark was standing in front of a private residence that was undergoing renovation with scaffolding all around it. In front of the residence’s entry was a small thru street that was now blocked off to traffic, making it a private driveway.

I quickly ran back to my car and backed it down the street and into the private driveway, hidden from view. Mark set up his equipment and for the next 90 minutes, we had our own little set and a complete run of the street. The rain stopped as Mark started shooting me on a street unlike anywhere in NYC. You would have thought we were in Vienna or some other old city in Europe. It really was unbelievable and thanks to the clouds, there were no shadows that would have been created had the sun been out. Mark and I couldn’t have asked for a better day or 2 better locations.

As we wrapped up the shoot I went into the bakery across from the driveway, which had just opened, to buy everyone lattes. Then we packed up and headed back to mid-town Manhattan to drop off Mark and Carolyne at their hotel, having completed a somewhat magical morning in NYC. Mark and I had been talking about doing a photoshoot together for over a year and now it had finally come to pass. There was no way back then that we could have planned such a day. With the photoshoot behind me, I was now in the right frame of mind to head into the studio. 😎

To be continued…