Music Matters

Newton, MA

(Find downloadable tracks from Time & Motion here, and all of the new Robbing the Cradle tunes here!)

Thank you so much for clicking through to the blog, and I hope you’re enjoying both what I’m writing here as well as the music our little band is putting out.

It’s been a little while since I put a blog post up, but I wanted to take this particular moment to thank you all for listening, and for joining us on this ride. The simple fact that you’re reading this and listening to us means that you must share something of the love that we have for music and what it has meant in our lives.

For me, all this starts about the age of six or seven, listening with friends to the Steve Miller band on an old LP player, pretending that we were playing along.  This then quickly proceeded to using my own money to buy my first LP records with incredible artwork.  Starting with Styx and Kiss, the Cars and then moving on to Cheap Trick, Tom Petty, Pink Floyd, Yes, and eventually Rush.  I listened to everything I could; I listened hard and read everything, and then dreamed…

These bands took the care to put themselves into not just their songs, but into entire albums.  These albums oozed human effort, warts and all.  They weren’t pristine, they weren’t perfect, but they were real expressions of the human heart and mind bringing forth the soul in a way where you paid full and rapt attention.  And these albums were things you had to wait for, because they were being written and crafted in such away (and without the crutches of digital alteration and correction) that there’s real care, and real human performance.

The great thing is is that some of this magic has continued. Bands like Nirvana and Kyuss, and then Porcupine Tree, NIN, Dream Theater, Queens of the Stone Age and Foo Fighters keep putting out great album oriented concepts.  Collections of songs that don’t just advertise for 3 minutes, but instead take you on a journey.

It’s really hard to explain to anyone below the age of 30 what that feeling is like. That spending that seven dollars to get that collection of 10 or a dozen songs that you would then sit there and listen to over and over again. And importantly, these were albums – collections of songs that hung together and told the story, or at least told the story of where that band was at a particular point in time. They were snapshots of life put to music. Dreams in motion.

We are trying to carry-on in that same tradition. Writing songs that stand on their own and tell a story, but which also hold together as a total album.  Collections where you can put the disc in (and maybe eventually put the LP on) and lose yourself in a story or a mood for a half hour or an hour.

Time and Motion does that. What we’re putting together for Robbing the Cradle will do that.  Already have the basics of the songs set up, and we’ll make the collection available in bits as we have it. We will also put a few downloadables up on Bandcamp when we think they’re ready.

But… please reach out to us and let us know what you think! Let us know what you like, and what you’d like to hear more of.  Also let us know about the music that’s made a difference in your life! It’s a grand journey, life. Let us know what your soundtrack sound like!

And… Maybe you could share our music with others like us. People who want to hear real songs laying out stories of life and love and really loud guitars. You know, the good stuff!

(PS – the photos above? Yeah, that’s me, Chris – main songwriter and curator of the blog. One photo from age 16 and one from December….)