San Diego Sessions by Robert Lindsay Nathan

It just seems that the intensity of the struggle for the legal tender here on the lower west coast is such that folks here just plain don’t have a lot of time to invest in friendships. Living in a hotel room doesn’t help from my end.

The second thing that happened was that I got a fairly handsome offer on a piece of property that I own in Little Rock, Arkansas. My plan was to produce some pilot tracks and then go to Congress House Studios in Austin, Texas and have Mark Hallman produce the final cut. I was going to set aside some of the proceeds from the sale of the Little Rock property to fund this project.

So in the spring of 2005, I started recording pilot songs on a Tascam 2488 multitrack recorder in my hotel room. Things were moving along well. On the few weekends that I had away from my real job, I would take hiking trips up into the mountains east of here with my dog Medina. Spring is a fine time for hiking here. The photo of the stone pyramid on the CD was taken at the summit of the trail that leads up to the top of Vejas Mountain. I thought that it was fitting to put it on the CD face, given my background in Architecture and Construction. I also felt it to be a metaphor for the publishing of this CD, which I consider to be a summit of sorts.

In the evenings I would record or write music, and during the days I would do my work. In September, thinking that my stay in San Diego was coming to an end and because Medina was getting to be pretty restless (living in a hotel room and a pickup truck), I hauled her and most of my recording gear back to Texas. It was then I met with Mark Hallman at Congress House and discussed the project. On my return to San Diego, I kept writing and recording, but was limited to a single stereo track on my Sharp mini disc recorder. I would dub and then later master these recordings on my laptop using Goldwave software.

In late October, I had enough material for my pilot CD to take to Austin and start rounding up studio musicians to do the final CD project. But then, I learned from my realtor that the deal in Little Rock had died and was not going to close, so I lost my funding for the project.

After a little soul searching I decided not to wait until I could get the work near perfect, so I published the pilot CD that you see and sample on this site. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it is what it is and I make no apologies. At this point in my life, I have the feeling that if I get too serious about this music thing, it will become too much like having a job. How appropriate that we work at our jobs but we play music. Any artist will tell you that they do it for the love of it, not the money.

So here’s the thing. If anything you hear or read on this website (or it’s links) touches you in the very least and compels you to think that you may want to purchase this CD, look at it this way; every dime that I net from this moderately crude endeavor will go toward the next project. Trust me on this one thing; I have a boatload of material that is as good or better than what you hear on this site. And maybe if I get enough dimes together, I’ll wind up at Congress House Studios, in Austin, or even back to my roots at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals. Our investment will pay a dividend in the form of some new and better art, and you will be proud to say that you had a hand in making it happen.

Enough selling…I hope you enjoy listening to this disc as much as I enjoyed making it.

Robert Lindsay Nathan

San Diego, Ca.

January 13, 2006

ABOUT THE TRACKS:

Track #1 was written circa 1973

Tracks 3, 6, 8, 9 and 11 were written in San Diego.

Track #12 is a theme that I started playing some time in the eighties. It changes a bit every time I play it, seemingly evolving into something different year after year. What is on this CD is a snapshot of the 2005 version. The name “Meteor” came to me while I was in San Diego.

The remaining tracks were written in the last two years, some having been unfinished until I put this CD together. The lyrics from track #2 came together one afternoon as the result of a furious exchange of haiku over the internet between the collaborators; Gary Cross and Charles Wakeland of Austin Texas, Jim Mahoney of Venice, Florida and myself.

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