The First & Last Goodbye

In 2014 I made an attempt to cut a record of the tunes I used to perform as a busker, a career I had all but abandoned for years at that point due to no longer living in an area that supported buskers.

My arthritis – that I had been suffering from since childhood – started to get severely limiting by this point. I no longer had the dexterity I had in my 20s; There was no more shredding out blistering neoclassical metal solos like what had made me (somewhat) YouTube famous. I was lucky to record what I did, but after laying down all the instruments, I found what I had recorded didn’t match what I used to perform.

I tried to fix it with clever editing, layering multiple instruments, and even re-interpretations of these tunes to take advantage of things a recording can do that a solo performer can’t, and I just.. Never could be happy with it.

So, I abandoned it with the idea that maybe - after treatment for my arthritis - I’d be able to try again.

16 years later, and treatment has seemingly failed me. I can still play short stretches here and there, but the sheer number of takes it would require to try to cut this record again just aren’t feasible with the continuously declining functionality of my hands due to both arthritis in addition to neuropathy from CMT.

I didn’t want to completely abandoned the idea of releasing something tied to my history as a busker, so.. year after year I listened to the old recordings again..

..and again..

..and again.

Two tracks stood out to me as a perfect matched pair that - with a little time spent on tone, and cutting away all the extras I originally recorded - would serve well as a bit of legacy for my history as a busker for the folks who remember me.

St. James Infirmary has been one of those great tunes that a lot of my favorite blues artists recorded, and became a signature song for me as a busker that most folks seemed to enjoy.. And being able to just take the lyrics and write my own guitar part that matched how the words made me feel was cathartic in so many ways.

About 2 years after adding St. James Infirmary to my busking set, I decided I wanted to explore it a bit more.. So I decided to write a version of St. James Infirmary from the reversed perspective of a former lover seeing my own dying body on the slab. At that time I was on a big jazz kick, but I couldn’t help myself and let my blues roots take over with the new version. Still, there is an obvious free-form flash to some of the chord structures taken from my passion for jazz.

So, that’s how we came to “The First & Last Goodbye”. Two songs about saying goodbye, rich with personal symbolism that’s rooted deep within me and could only be realized years later, well after the original recording was done.

It’s not perfect. Not by any metric.

It’s enough for me, though that it simply - and finally - is.

Track List:

1. St. James Infirmary Blues
2. St. James Infirmary, Reprise

Get it on:

Coming soon to multiple streaming platforms; until then, own it DRM-free via Ko-Fi for as little as $1!