I was astride a fine dappled mare named Maggie in the hills of Tennessee when I finally got an interesting idea for a new album. I happened to be directly behind my father in a line of horses bearing various members of my extended family. A couple of years ago Dad and his wife Vicki hit upon the idea of taking a family trip at Christmas instead of giving gifts; this year’s edition was taking place on a blustery weekend in January at a dude ranch in the foothills of the Smokies.

I had been kicking a verse and a chorus of a new song around for the entire morning but continually running into a brick wall as soon as the first chorus finished. Another verse would begin to formulate, then fall apart. Was it too soon to go to a bridge? What would the bridge be about? This verse and chorus already had guns and heartbreak in them, never easy topics to follow. Repeat the chorus again?

How about a modulation into a funky boogaloo? Mmmm... yes. And then another modulation into a slightly more restrained and jazzy solo echoing the verse? Aaahhh... The whole thing fell right into place as I leaned back into the saddle against the mountainous grade. Seemingly on cue, Dad’s horse paused to drop what appeared to be 17 pounds of steaming green excrement on the trail in front of me.

The events of 2005 thus far have been no less random or unpredictable. I had been enjoying a couple of weeks off in January until a very unexpected phone call from the Colonel got my teeth grinding again. Nettwerk Records had just called to inform him that, due to a loss of funding from EMI and a supposedly drastic restructuring of the company, they would not be picking up the option for my next album. The detailed conversations regarding said album that had occurred as recently as late December were deemed irrelevant; there was nothing to be done but accept another cold reality of the music business and get on with life.

I have become accustomed to the low percentage of returns one generally reaps from one’s expectations of Corporate America, but these were Canadians, for Chrissake; I thought they were nothing if not reliable. To the point, in fact, that Natalie and I had committed ourselves to a couple of slightly ambitious financial situations that depended on a little startup capital from Vancouver. The air around me suddenly reeked of panic. I was not an easy man to be around for a day or two.

A few weeks after these fateful events, I took to the road supporting Hem, a talented group of sweet folks from Brooklyn who play their own unique brand of nouveau Countrypolitan. I can’t say that I was particularly thrilled to be leaving my wife at home for three weeks in our newly impoverished state, but the shows eventually began to ease the tension. It was nice to have some good car time to sort through things. I also saved myself a lot of heartache by strictly scheduling my alcohol consumption and visiting the local YMCA’s along the way. There is something incredibly grounding for me about going to a YMCA in this country. They all smell the same, everyone is nice and you can always have a random and oddly soothing conversation with a fat guy in the sauna.

Hem’s audiences were awfully quiet and respectful. The band seems to have made its way into the world with a lot of help from National Public Radio. I actually saw people reading books before the show. (I, in fact, read books before the show) It was very refreshing to just walk onstage and play instead of fighting with a crowd that has better things to do than listen to an opening act. I was also encouraged to find that most of the people I talked to at the shows had no idea who I was, which was much better than finding out that they did and just didn’t care. In the future, I will try to curry favor with these fine folks over a nice glass of claret.

The shows contained their usual array of surprises: I ran into Whynot Jansveld in Cincinnati (he’s now playing with Gavin DeGraw). The alcohol schedule was appended, but only for a night. I had some excellent dolmades (stuffed grape leaves) in Columbus and a purifying tofu and vegetable concoction, not to mention a fine chat with Linda and Dale, in Ann Arbor. The two-night stand in Chicago was my first official booze appointment, which I kept in style with my friend Brad Peterson. I bought a couple of great hats the next day as the snow flurries began to build into a blizzard.

It was tricky work driving to Minneapolis the next day for a crowd that could not even be won over with a exceptionally competent cover of a Replacements song. The next morning I had breakfast with my childhood friend J.P. before setting off to Omaha, a town I had actually never been to before. I enjoyed the long drive across the snowy plains of Middle America, and the show turned out to be one of the highlights of the tour.

I flew back to the ‘Ville for a few days while the Hems drove all the way to Seattle via Denver. I met them there for a good show at the Tractor Tavern. The next day I made it into Portland early to hang out with my childhood buddy Jay. Joe Brookhouse had been kind enough to drop off a bottle of excellent vodka that was mostly gone before the show, which went swimmingly, I thought. Jay and I stumbled around to a few more of his haunts downtown before going back to his house and calling everyone we could remember from high school.

Moving on: Eugene, Oregon is the city my father went to college in. I only succeeded in getting into an argument with a waiter about how to prepare Massaman Curry and limping through my show. Sorry, Pop; fortunately, the kids are still very accommodating in Eugenia.

For some unknown reason I elected to spend my day off in McCall, California, a town in the foothills of Seneca Mountain that is nice to look at but very limited on commerce in February. I spent the day drinking wine (the alcohol schedule was permanently appended for the West Coast leg of the tour) and reading a bad novel on the hotel’s wraparound porch, then drove a few towns over for a decent Mexican meal.

San Francisco was next; I had a nice chat with my step brother Eric and his girlfriend Agnes before calling it an early night. After a mere 13 hours in the Cit-aaa-eee by the Bay I was back on the road. I took the terrible drive down the I-5 to Los Angeles, where I promptly checked into the Hyatt on Sunset and commenced to drinking more wine. The gig at the Troubadour was pretty successful minus a few slurred comments regarding my current place in the music industry; I was also able to reconnect with a few friends and former label associates.

I dreamed my way into San Diego (the drive was the best part of the day) then set out across the desert for Tucson the next morning full of renewed motivation and strange cacti inspiration. I was happy to take Tim, Hem’s tour manager, to the wonderful Cafe Poca Cosa. It should be mentioned that Tim earned this meal and many more in the future with his stupendously upstanding treatment of me during the entire tour. He checked in with me daily to see if I was making my drives and provided a metaphorical shoulder to cry on on a few occasions. Relationships with the headlining band’s tour manager are rarely this thorough, trust me.

The Hem tour wrapped a few nights later in St. Louis. I drove home after the gig and began plotting new directions to deal with the situation at hand. I had already had preliminary talks with Brad Jones regarding my new record. On top of completely confirming my instinct that he was the right choice for a producer over an excellent Mediterranean meal, he agreed to begin the recording process with next to no funding given my current label status. (I will take this opportunity to send out a firm and unending hug to my father, who graciously lent some seed money to the project to get the ball rolling) Brad and I had a few more preliminary meetings to review my rather sparse demos, during which an entirely more adventurous approach was settled on. I distinctly remember Brad questioning the necessity of verses on a song called ‘Hallelujah, I Was Wrong’, inspiring me to drop the verses completely and entirely rearrange the song in a flurry of free association and marijuana. He also had an idea to break the first chorus of another song down to dueling ukuleles and vocals. He continued to warp my musical mind as the process continued; the 19 days we spent making the album were some of the most ridiculous and fulfilling of my brief recording career. I will elaborate at a later date; the last time I committed a ‘making of’ journal entry to these pages before the release of the album it ended up not coming out for nearly three years.

WHEREVER YOU ARE is the name of that particular mini-opus, the very one that was ready to drop as April began it’s tumultuous blossoming into May. I took Paul Deakin and the Brothers Henry up to the Louisville-Cincinnati-Indianapolis Triangle for a few highly encouraging gigs at the beginning of the month, finished up mixing the new album with Brad and made ready to conquer Scandinavia, where WYA was being released on the 28th. Natalie and I got lucky when John F. Fairhead, our real estate agent, pulled a few tricks and procured some much-needed cash out of some dicey speculation that was beginning to seem hopeless. The metaphysical relief was beyond description.

That being said, being behind the proverbial eight ball has made for some of the best days I’ve had in a long time. Poverty has made me evaluate the measure of manhood in a way that I am slightly embarrassed to admit to not doing in awhile. The texture and sweetness of all things is amplified by a growing realization that life is short and money or the lack thereof is a stupid fucking thing to be restrained by. A nagging assumption that more cash will somehow alleviate or validate the essential problems of being human is a pain in the ass, one more cheap excuse for planning instead of being.

At the moment, my only real worry is that I’m wide awake at 3:07 AM Greenwich Mean Time in a foreign country with no one to wake me up for my 6:00 train but myself and the kind folks at the Oslo Radisson. I am staring down five shows in a row in five different cities starting today, and the view is good. I was trying to explain all of this to my Mom yesterday over a unexplainably hissy transatlantic connection. She understood. I could have been a banker, the taste of freedom is stronger than cigarettes, etc., etc....

‘And here I go again on my owowown...’
-WHITESNAKE