Blanco County Lights #11 - " Greenville Avenue"
The final track on the Blanco County Lights album is a piano ballad called "Greenville Avenue".
So now we've come to the eeeeeeend of the road. (Sorry, I just had a Boys II Men brain-burst.) But it's true: this is the end of the album. Once we made our final selections as to which songs would be included on the record, I began playing with the order of the tracks. In every instance, this was the last song on the album. It feels like an end. It's also a beginning, of sorts, as the next album will pick up where this one left off. It's a sign of things to come.
As for the song itself, I wrote it a long time ago on a cheap Casio keyboard while living in an apartment in the Dallas area. I've spent more than a handful of evenings down on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, a strip of road home to many bars, pubs, restaurants and questionable decisions. We've all got our ways to deal with things. We put on faces. We pretend we're fine and we hope that if we pretend long enough, time will grant us release and it will become our reality.
I've been playing this tune at live shows, every now and then -- whenever a piano was available -- and it seems to really connect with people in an unexpected way. It's a very personal and raw song -- and it's honest in a way that if I spend much more time thinking about it, the vulnerability will start to make me uncomfortable and I'll start wondering if maybe I share too much.
When we recorded the song, I wanted it to convey those sentiments by keeping the recording raw, genuine, and simple. The piano track was captured by Case Mundy at Wire Road Studios in Houston, using a fantastic Steinway grand piano. Vocals were recorded with Jack at White Cat Studio. The beautiful cello part was written and played by Liz Lee (Austin, TX) and recorded by my buddy Andy Sharp at Scharf-Sharp Farms/Music Lane Studios in Austin, TX.
Tomorrow is Digital Release Day for the Record. Thank you for reading these stories about the songs, I really appreciate it. I hope it was interesting. If you missed any of them, they're all available here:
Track 5 - "Blanco County Lights"