A Road Worth Walking Down Artist’s Notes

Musicians

Greg Greenway: acoustic guitar, piano, drum programming, vocals
Doug Wray: bass
Eric Braunsdorg: drums
David Waters: electric guitar
David Wilcox: acoustic guitar

Backing Vocals:
Julie Woods
Maria Sangiolo
Ron Curcio
Dave Dickerson
David Wilcox

For Roscoe and Jean
and what they hath wrought

Special Thanks

to those Who, by holding this music in their hearts and minds, have made it real:
Karen D‘Arcy, Bill Deery, Chuck Dixon, Roger & Nancy Hoit (the ineffables), Sarah Hoit & Burke Whitman, Marshall McLean, Lisa Spear McLean, Lara Spear, Jeni Spear, Barnes Newberry & everyone at The Blackthorne Tavern, Moe & Bona Pearson, George & Sharon Purtill, LLQ, RPR, 8: LQR, Cicely Richardson, Peter Cecere 8: everyone at The Tape Complex, Fay, Chuck, Jackson, Kay, Skip, Amy, Doug Wray (the world’s greatest living human), Dave D. (photo finish second), Ronny, Julie “the mellifluous”, Maria, my family, Robert Haigh (without whom, none of this would have been possible), David Wilcox, who has been so incredibly generous with his time, his voice, and his support, spreadsheet Robbie, and, of course, Audrey, the beautiful source of so much happiness.

David Wilcox appears courtesy of A&M Records

All lyrics and music by Greg Greenway,
except: Free At Last, music by Greg Greenway
and Ron Curcio, lyrics by Greg Greenway
Vocal arrangements by
Greg Greenway and Ron Curcio.

Artist Notes on the Making of the CD

In the summer of 1991, a year after my father had died, it became apparent to me that my musical life had to change. The loss of your first parent is a confrontation with your own mortality. I was essentially still apprenticing in Rock music, giving it everything I had, learning a tremendous amount, realizing that we were not a match made in heaven. It didn't want me, and once I saw how it worked, I realized that it would never work. Fortunately for me, I have some very loyal chosen family and a lot of people who were happy to welcome me back to acoustic music.

My great friend, Karen D'Arcy, told me about the open mic at the Old Vienna Coffeehouse in Westboro, MA. We drove out from Boston on a Thursday night and restarted my acoustic career. Robert Haigh who ran the open mic helped me immeasurably on my reentry. So much of where I am in music was because he sent A Road Worth Walking Down to a lot of important people, Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, The Boston Music Awards, WUMB in Boston, Dick Pleasants, the famous Folk DJ in Concord, MA. He introduced me to David Wilcox, Shawn Colvin, and Greg Brown. This was a world that I wanted to succeed in. In the realm of going toward what naturally comes to you, this was a perfect fit.

But, the moment of truth for all of this came when I least suspected it. I was visiting my chosen family, the Hoits, on Cape Cod, and my father/brother, Roger Hoit asked me essentially what my plan was. As we talked, I told him that I needed to make a CD as an acoustic artist to reestablish myself. He did something remarkable - something I'll forever be indebted to him for. He got up, left the room, and came back with a legal pad and a mechanical pencil (his IS an Architect). In a very calm, methodical manner, we listed all the things that had to occur to make this CD come to life. We made a budget right there off of the top of our heads and an investor plan. We had the investors in a couple of days and I started recording in October. On December 19, 1991, I picked up the CDs from a manufacturer in Maine. But, in my life, I had never had someone do what Roger did. He helped me realize a dream, when I had no idea of how to make it happen. In his typical style, it was all very low key and understated. But, he changed my life.

Artist Notes on the Songs

Free at Last
D tuning (DADF#AD) Capo on 3, in the key of F
On June 23, 1990, just four months from his release from Robben Island Prison, Nelson Mandela was received at the hatch shell in Boston by over 200,000 people. I was in that joyous, diverse crowd. I’d followed the South Africa’s policy of apartheid since hearing Gil Scott Herron sing “what’s the word, Johannesburg.” I still treasure the T-shirt I bought that day.

I don’t remember exactly when, but my friend and phenomenal piano player, Ron Curcio, sent me a tape with a musical idea around the phrase that Mandela used that day - echoing Martin Luther King - “free at last.” I wasn’t comfortable with using lines from a spiritual, but it stuck in my head, it kept singing to me. Finally, it won me over. I remember visiting friends on Cape Cod, standing outside, away from everyone, playing my guitar when I found the chords and rhythm that made me sing those words. It was in the D tuning that I had inherited from Richie Havens, but with a different slant. I decided to find chords I’d never played before, to treat D tuning more like standard, to play inverted, internal chords that don’t use all six strings. It was really an idea that opened open tunings up for me, becoming a path I have followed since.

I think of Free at Last as the first song that was truly me. I know that’s wrong, but it feels that way. It allowed all of my energy to emerge, it was rhythmic, and about something larger than myself. It changed my shows, changed me.

Tennessee
G tuning (DGDGBD) Capo on 2, in the key of A
This was written for my first girlfriend in Boston. Patty had just graduated from BU on full scholarship for piano. She had faced that moment in a formally trained musician’s life when they have to decide if they can continue in that world. She’d decided to go to architecture grad school in St. Louis and this was her last summer in Boston. She’d stopped playing essentially. But our conversations always came back to music. One of her music professors had recorded a haunting record of Scarlatti fugues, played in cathedral in Europe. We listened to it all the
time. A fugue is a weaving together of four melodies, each one compelling on its own. But, you can get lost in listening, following one trail or the next.

As you might imagine, I was a little uptight in my first months in Boston. I’d put everything on the line, coming to a place where I knew no one, to write music. Patty was anything but. She showed me to all of the great places in Boston, with joy, with ease, with fun. I was determined to hear her play before she left and finally after much lobbying on my part, just once, she gave me that honor. She was phenomenal, so gifted. In an instant, I saw an entirely different Patty. I saw her journey and her depth, and as I look back, how far I had to go as a human being.

The song is a confluence of my memory and my wishfulness, not really biography, but a constructed story. It was so difficult to boil down all of her reasons for stopping and to include the fact that after she was in school (again after much lobbying from me) she got a piano in her room and set the “notes upon the pages” aside. I just couldn’t believe that someone so talented could walk away. She was miles ahead of me in so many ways.
The line, “days with desires so fiercely in confusion,” is one I’ll always be proud of, because it so captures my early days in Boston - and probably that time in everyone’s life. So this song is more accurate about me than Patty, and it makes me want to apologize to her for the over-simplification. As always, this is the danger in writing a song about someone. I hope that she was appreciative of the effort and forgiving of the rest.

Don’t Go
G tuning (DGDGBD), Capo on 5, in the key of G
My father died on May 4, 1990, and the ensuing shock waves produced the energy for me to stop the hejira (some would call it protracted adolescence) and come home musically to my best self. I found myself sitting in a chair beside the great father/brother figure in my life, Roger Hoit. We were talking about what I wanted to do with my music and as he quietly produced a legal pad, we sat there in his family room and mapped out my future. That unprecedented moment led to the making of A Road Worth Walking Down and my eternal gratitude for Roger.

My own father was a very complex duality of get-it-done seriousness and relentless frivolity. As my two older brothers and I were discussing my father after his memorial service, I realized that we were talking about three different people. But, ultimately, throughout the filter of different relationships, aren’t we all multiplicitous. Don’t Go reflects the two sides of my father through our yearly trips to the beach as a family. “Half of him the instigator, half of him the passerby.” As the song says, “later on we all would find him.” Truly that was a major impetus for me as my dad recovered from the minor stroke that would forewarn us of the one that would finally collapse him to the bedroom carpet on a Friday afternoon in May.

So as he would go out to the privacy of a bench by the ocean, as the early morning sun infused the ocean with white light, I would find him. Isolated beyond the noisy busy of family, we would have adult conversations, serious conversations. I was always asking, and he would answer in protracted stories. Sometimes I would find myself nodding and saying yes to names I couldn’t recognize, always to further the dialogue. There were an infinite number of inlets in the bays of his stories. Sometimes I needed him to get to port.

After he died, in the weeks before we were going to return to the beach for the first time without him, I found myself writing a song in my apartment in Boston. I don’t remember what that song was because it was overwritten by the instant that Don’t Go arrived- as if a molecule had floated in the air and into my consciousness. It contained the title, the tuning, and the direction that the verses would take.. All I had to do was learn it. I’d heard the dissonance needed for that opening chord in Peter Gabriel’s Red Rain (a detail I would repeat in Letting Go at my mother’s death). Everything flowed from that moment.

When we recorded A Road Worth Walking Down, Dave Dickerson said to me as I arrived at Pyramid Studios, “you have to hear this.” He’s just mixed the background vocals to Don’t Go. In hearing Julie Woods’s voice sing “endless sea,” I nearly cried. All of the moments that lead to a song become one in a tine like that. “Every footprint in the sand.”

A Road Worth Walking Down
G tuning (DGDGBD), no capo, in the key of D
This song was only a title when we decided to start recording the CD. I simply
knew that this was the phrase that held all of the energy that we were about to make real. I used to run from my apartment on the Fenway across the Mass Ave. bridge to the track at MIT. I remember being almost to the Cambridge side when I saw myself running in my own shadow. Instantly, I felt the central metaphor for the past casting a shadow on where I was going. Then I believe I was driving somewhere and trying to write the song. I thought of Cat Steven’s Moonshadow, and how he moved the lyrics through different parts of his body. Suddenly, I thought feet, eyes, mind, heart.

In G tuning, the biggest you can get is with the D chord anchored by that big D on
the bass string. So, it had to be in D in G tuning. As any player will tell you, that
directive to find what you need in the neck of your guitar is one of the most amazingly possessing journeys of your musical life - especially when you feel that you have once in a lifetime lyrics waiting for you at the end. Sometimes it leads nowhere, sometimes you find magic. Then, when you find it, can you play it. Then when you can play it, can you play it and sing it. This is why I do what I do. You have to earn a song like A Road Worth Walking Down.

Without a Prayer
Standard Tuning, Capo on 2, in the key of A
I was in the middle of writing a song containing the argument against socially conscious music, when the famous image of a man holding shopping bags stood in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square in Bejing appeared on every television in America. We watched “Freedom Spring” being crushed before the eyes of the world.

My college roommate and acting manager, Bill Deery, was working with one of the student leaders of the Democracy in China movement, trying to get traction in the US. My band, Trace of Red, recorded Without a Prayer and it led to an invitation to play at the Lincoln Memorial at what was projected to be a huge Democracy in China demonstration. This became one of the truly enlightening moments of my&nbsplife.

When we arrived at the Lincoln memorial, we were shocked by how few people were there - and at the palpable fear in the Chinese nationals that were. The story that unwound was a real-life lesson to each of us. The Chinese government has the largest, most active foreign intelligence organization in the world. The van rented by the student leaders was broken into in D.C. and a ledger with the list of all of the names of the Democracy movement was taken. The Chinese government was very open in its condemnation of the protest and vowed that there would be reprisals on the families of any Chinese national showing their face. After seeing the photographs of people crushed by tanks, no one doubted their seriousness.

It was difficult for me to hold the bravery of these organizers up against the fatuous apathy demonstrated by the eligible voters in the US at the time (This theme was to be repeated in One Man, One Woman, One Vote on Singing for the Landlord). It was also difficult to hear that the DeeJays at WBCN in Boston rejected it as “preachy pop.” But, then to complete the circle, Dan Storper at Putamayo Music asked me to sing it at Carnegie Hall in the 1st Annual New York Singer-Songwriter Festival. Such is life.

Falling
Gm/C tuning (CGDGBflatD), Capo on 2, in the key of Am
An early morning phone call shook me out of sleep and into an all too real new day. A doleful voice told me of the death of a friend, our former classmate. I'd just seen her for the first time in several years only a month before - it was the first time I'd ever even heard the word "lupus." In looking it up, I had obviously not grasped the seriousness of the situation. In college, she'd been a star athlete, willowy strong and full of life. When I met her with our mutual friend in Boston that month before, I was alarmed at how frail and dissipated she looked. But, she discounted it saying that she'd be fine. She didn't look fine. I had a terrible lingering feeling from that meeting. Our mutual friend later told me that she had been hospitalized, but that she should recover. I had never experienced anything like it at the time, I hadn't learned to interpret for myself what was being said beyond the words. I wrote to her in the hospital in Philadelphia and got a couple of letters back. I'll never forget the shock of her last one - her handwriting was virtually a scribble, and the letter even had a small spattering of blood that someone had tried to wipe away. It was shortly after getting that letter that I got the phone call. It was shortly after that that I wrote the song.

Summer Song
D Tuning, Capo on 2, in the key of E
One of my earliest songs, played at my audition for the Nameless Coffeehouse in Harvard Square - the place that started everything for me.

The song is a confulence of my influences. I inherited D tuning from my first remote teacher, Richie Havens, and the three finger picking style from James Taylor (who forever changed the sound of an acoustic guitar, and as I've heard said, made guitar sellers around the country very happy). It occurred to me to combine these two things one day and the result was Summer Song. Those early summers in Boston were the happiest in my life. But, it's hard to take myself seriously without a little melancholy at the end.

Waterfall
(I ended up playing this in Bflat from G tuning, Capo on 3, but on this recording, David Wilcox played the guitar track, starting with spinning the tuning pegs randomly, and then adjusting them slightly. I'm sure Dave doesn't remember what tuning this is)
The plan was to put one mic up in the room and have the singers stand in a circle around it and do it completely a cappella. After Dave had sung on "Don't Go," we took him to lunch and he asked what we were doing that afternoon in the studio. We told him and he asked if he could participate. I was ecstatic. Of course! So that when the famous (to me) moment where he asked if I'd be ok with him playing some guitar. Again, I said, "of course." He used my guitar, twisted all of the tuning pegs in a completely random way. Then he played out the strings, listened to what he'd done, tweaked it a bit, and he was ready.

From the beginning, Waterfall was geared as an audience participation song, and as an avenue for me to be more adventurous in my singing. The teaching of the song to the audience was almost as important as the song itself. So, recording it in as live a situation as a studio can present was essential. Every time I hear it, I'm being reintroduced to those wonderful singers who became friends and compatriots in our musical journeys.

Forever Forever

Massachusetts