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Available on November 12, 2012 from Amazon.com.
Awaiting word from Itunes as to when they’ll make it available.
Should be near or on that date as well. Stay tuned.
Details about Love and Streets are here.

“Love and Streets” will be available next month on Amazon, Itunes, Spotify etc..

all them digital places that they say pay royalties and everything. What a novel concept.

Here’s the finalized track list…and a short blurb about each song…

Love and Streets
The Show
Suzie
Road Weary
A Fighter
The Indianapolis
My Lai
Drunk Driving
I Hate To Get Up in the Morning
Away
Love Is a Four Letter Word

Tom Flannery – guitar/vocals
recorded at the Home Office in Archbald, PA
produced by Tom Flannery
all songs written by Tom Flannery
copyright 2012 BMI
cover photo by Aaron Condida

Love and Streets – wrote these words down in my notebook. That’s all I had for a while. “Love and Streets”. Actually started writing a play using the title, but abandoned it after about 10 pages. There’s too much love and streets out there to write a coherent 2 act play about, and besides I had killed all my characters off before the end of the first act. My fictional town was a pretty desperate place….so I said screw it and wrote a 3 minute song instead.

Messed up sheets / cold and heat / heroin eyes / on the kids you meet
broken windows / lies and cheats / the long gone junkies / on love and streets

But there’s still hope out there too (or at least my version of it)

Just one more score / to settle our debts / get as clean / as we can get
maybe plant a seed / in our piece of ground / ignore the past / when it comes around
we got love and streets

Yea…even though that’s a bit warped, sometimes hope is kinda crooked. I’m reminded of that fool Rumsfeld trying to describe Iraq’s sudden descent into forced democracy in the midst of carnage and looting. He called it “un-tidy”.

Exactly. The only thing the guy ever said that made any fucking sense.

We take hope when and how it presents itself. So all in all, maybe a song of sin and redemption….all the while knowing that sinning again is inevitable.

The Show – A few years back I took my daughter to her first AAA baseball game. Scranton still had the Red Barons then and the county commissioners were not in prison. The stadium was maybe a third full. We had seats down the 3rd base line and as the players were running past I noticed that while most of them would probably not get past a bar bouncer, some were obviously minor league vets. Lines in their face from the sun, and worry in their eyes from holding onto their dreams maybe a little longer than their talent warranted. Most were pitchers….and they looked old enough to have conceived the catchers they were tossing to.

Lost 7 of 9 throwing mostly junk / mopped up a few when my sinker sunk
then they sent me down hoping for the best / 5 years on I still can’t rest
I go Thursday night in Abilene / with a lot of phone calls in between
my little girl says daddy when you coming home / I tell her sweetheart I just don’t know

I got home that night, and wrote the song. I never recorded it, though I played it live at some shows. My friend Lorne Clarke noticed I never put it on a record and used to say, as only a 300 pound Canadian can, “as you stupid?”. Well, maybe. But not anymore.

Suzie – I have many goals. It keeps things interesting. One of them is to write the perfect pop song. Like “Wonderwall” or “Found Out About You”. In their own way, each of those songs is as good as “Like a Rolling Stone”. I speak such apparent blasphemy while wearing my songwriter hat….and I don’t care how goofy it sounds to compare Noel Gallagher and Doug Hopkins to Bob Dylan. Shit….put me up against Tiger Woods from 100 yards, and let him hit one ball and let me hit 100 balls….I bet I can get it closer at least once. All it takes is one flushed wedge and a good bounce. But I do think that a truly great pop song is as rare as an epoch shattering opus like “Like a Rolling Stone”. How many times did Brian Wilson write something as staggeringly good as “God Only Knows”? Oh, probably never, and he was Brian friggin’ Wilson! Know what that says? This shit is fucking hard.

All this being said, I’m not suggesting this little ditty of mine is comparable in any way to any of the aforementioned songs. If it were so, I’d be an obscenely rich man and not feel the need to explain anything to anybody. Kinda like…well…Dylan.

No, not very likely, but I’ll never stop trying to find the perfect 3 minutes. There’s no search that’s more fun…or more damn frustrating.

Your dark eyes give nothing away / I never know just what to say
to compete with all the other guys/ with their fancy cars and desperate lies

Preach on brother….but keep it within 180 seconds.

Road Weary – I love seeing new places and new things. But I despise the effort it takes to get there. So I pretty much stay home unless somebody throws a lasso over me and drags me away. A barnstormer I ain’t. But every once in a while I have to hop a plane and enter the world of hotels and last-minute gate changes and rental cars and bar bills charged to the room. I don’t like it much. There’s no better feeling in the world than coming home.

I play open G tuning on this one by the way. Keith Richards taught me before he fell out of that tree.

A Fighter – I recorded Warren Zevon’s song “Boom Boom Mancini” for a Warren tribute album a few years ago. I grew up when boxing was boxing….and everybody knew who the heavyweight champ was. And like lots of other folks, I watched guys get killed. In the ring. On TV. Literally beaten to death.

The noise the smells the blood on the floor / searching without knowing what you’re looking for
some dish it out some take it slow / cause they ain’t got nowhere else to go
my daddy said “son….your soul’s on fire” / I said “daddy…you don’t understand
The Lord’s a liar

I saw some matches in Scranton….guys who looked like they left the bar stool a few minutes earlier and climbed into the ring to beat each others brains in to split whatever 10s and 20s promoter had left over. In retrospect it was pretty ghastly stuff….and about as on the level as pro wrestling. But the wounds were real and the blood drained the old-fashioned way. I have vague memories of the ring being pelted with orange drink containers when the blood lust lagged. I had no idea what I wanted to be in my life, but I knew that being a  boxer seemed a shit way to pay the rent.

So for 5 minutes in this song, I’m all these guys. It ain’t pretty.

The Indianapolis – If anybody knows this story, most likely it’s from Robert Shaw’s chilling monologue in the movie “Jaws”. The US ship that delivered the A bomb was torpedoed by a Japanese sub, and of the 900 men who went into the water, barely 300 came back out. Sharks took many of them. There’s a book about the disaster called “In Harm’s Way” that I highly recommend.

The song is not really a history lesson. Just an old man remembering…..or maybe trying not to.

Now I’m an old man / still never got further than the sand
dreams can bring me back and force my hand / like it was yesterday
Put a seashell to my ear / grandson says “papa what do you hear?”
I’ll turn so he can’t see the tear / someone tell me what to say?

There is an extraordinary woman who now lives in Seattle named Kim Roller, who took it upon herself to stage reunions of the Indy survivors. She heard this song and asked if she could use it to go with a video montage she had put together to show the men and their families. I was honored. They all heard the song. To them it mattered what I’d done. They invited me to subsequent reunions. In 2004 there were 110 living survivors. Today, there are 44. Kim has set up another reunion this August, in Indianapolis, Indiana.

I don’t think I’m worthy of taking up their time….but I’m proud that the song was used. It’s theirs now. I’m just glad others can hear it now too. Give the men a salute.

My Lai – Pete Townshend once wrote a song called “I’ve Known No War”. Townshend was born at the tail end of WWII, when Mom’s to-be would huddle in London bomb shelters at night to protect their unborns.

His generation had good timing that way. He may have wanted to die before he got old, but he never had to worry about getting plugged between the eyes by a German sniper or being blown to bits by an IED.

I’ve known no war either. I’m not a soldier. I’ve never been sent somewhere to kill someone my government said was my enemy. I grew up during Viet Nam but was too young to remember it. I watched wars in the Gulf on television, and they seemed like video games. Surgical. And certainly bloodless. Even when an American soldier was killed, it was back page news. Even the coffins were flown in under cover of darkness. People my age have no fucking idea what war is. The most grisly thing we’ve seen on war was staged for Stephen Spielberg’s cameras. I remember the uproar caused when the TV networks decided to air “Saving Private Ryan” un-edited. Way too bloody they said. Apparently they prefer the real thing? Less offensive and all that. And conveniently off-stage.

All I’ve learned about war in my years (I’ve read incessantly about it since my teens) is that it causes people to do things to other people that they wouldn’t normally do. And that the famous quote about evil only needing good people to do nothing to perpetuate seems almost, to use a Bush-era term, “quaint” these days. But it’s still out there…to haunt.

Even in the fog of war, there are good people who refuse to become perverted….at a time when perversion seems the most rational offer on the table. These are the true heroes. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that My Lai had them.

Drunk Driving – a song of unique desperation. How else to explain this…

Troopers and local cowboys / hiding among the elms
that woman is a Calvary cross / with a task to overwhelm

Bad day with the old lady fella?

So yea….it ain’t a good idea to drive with a bottle between your legs. But sometimes it’s hard to face the road ahead without a little bracer.

But really….this isn’t a song about booze at all. It’s a song about losing what you want and falling backwards towards the things that are way too easy to have short-term fun with.

Back in the dark ages….I speak of when MySpace was popular….a guy I got to know through there heard the song, and commented how much it meant to him…and how oddly soothing it was. Apparently he was going through a rough patch and the song hit a nerve. It’s always cool to hear feedback like that.

I Hate To Get Up in the Morning – A while back I decided to write and record an entire CD worth of material in 7 days. I don’t know why I decided to do this, but my threshold for boredom is notoriously low, and I think I was out of pharmaceuticals.

This is the first song I came up with, and probably the best. The first ones usually are. Just me having fun with a thesaurus, helped along by my then-new Gibson jumbo and hopped up on about 12 cans of diet coke.

But the struggle is worthy is what they say / but of course they’re not around today
just truckers, whores, and paper boys / spreading pride and spreading joy
grant us all your daily toil / and just a dab of mid-eastern oil
tell me what’s a grown man to do / I think I might have the flu

Who the hell knows what I was going on about? But who cares? Haven’t we all felt like this sometimes?

oh I hate getting up in the morning / and putting on a shirt and tie
like a whore in church I feel besmirched / so lonesome I could cry

Away – I wrote this before the West Memphis 3 were released. Myself and songwriter Josh Pratt decided to do something, anything, to shed light on this travesty of American justice. We wrote songs about it. Josh did some extraordinary work that I hope people can track down. He’s as good as songwriter as there is. Anywhere. That fact that you haven’t heard of him doesn’t alter his greatness one iota. It just means you haven’t heard of him.

Anyway, I don’t dabble in anything, so I was wearing my Free the Memphis 3 t-shirt every day and talking up their case to anybody who’d listen (my Mom got an earful….she even read the book about the case). Not many would, actually. Most are turned off when approached by zealots. That’s what I was, but I don’t apologize for it. Especially since the three then-boys are now free men. If not for pain in the ass zealots the Memphis 3 would still be in prison.

But now I realize that the song hit closer to home than I realized..

There ain’t much to do ’round here / smoke some dope and drink some beer
and look in the mirror when the music plays / hoping the guitar’ll take you away

That’s teen angst in four lines. That’s me in there. Still. It always creeps in. West Memphis, Arkansas. Scranton, Pennsylvania. It could, and does, happen everywhere.

Love Is a Four Letter Word – There’s a bizarre scene in the Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back” (ok, not many scenes in the film aren’t bizarre) where Dylan is sitting in a hotel room tap tap tapping on a typewriter while a somewhat desperate looking Joan Baez tries to get his attention by singing an uncompleted song of his called, apparently, “Love Is a Four Letter Word”. He clearly barely remembers writing the song, and comes across as not giving a shit about the song or Baez. Dylan was one focused motherfucker. If you got in his way, he rolled over your sorry ass. In 1964 he may have been the most arrogant man on planet earth. With good reason I might add.

I can’t remember anything about the Dylan song except the tag line….which I thought was inane enough to be incredibly clever in an “why didn’t I think of that?” kind of way. So I filed it away….and years later I searched my guitar for a pretty melody….and actually think I found one. Thus does borrowing become creation.

Love is an anchor that holds your place / and keeps you from drifting away
but the captain on the bridge / takes all the pain you give
because love is a four letter word

I once sang this song with an extraordinary female singer who later on moved to Nashville, where she was promised great wealth by an “insider” who turned out to be no more connected than any other huckster in Nashville. Last I heard the singer was waiting on tables….her amazing voice notwithstanding. Nashville must be a bitch.

Anyway, she sang a gorgeous harmony on the tag line, and after hearing herself demanded a co-writing credit. She had, she said, “written the harmony”. I told her if things worked that way Emmylou Harris would be richer than the Queen and JK Rowling combined. She didn’t like my analogy and never spoke to me again. Our Richard and Linda moment was over.

I hope she doesn’t hear this song. She may sue me for royalties.

— Tom Flannery
10/25/2012

It’s called “Love and Streets”

11 songs. All just me and the guitar recorded live in my basement on a Yamaha 8 track machine with 2 condenser mics. I didn’t overdub anything because I’m too dense to understand the Yamaha manual and too impatient to work on my denseness. I’m quite proud of this actually. I’d rather add a better third verse than a guitar solo.

Tentative running order for the tracks..

Love and Streets
The Show
Suzie
Road Weary
A Fighter
The Indianapolis
My Lai
Drunk Driving
I Hate To Get Up in the Morning
Away
Love Is a Four Letter Word

George Graham is mastering it now (nice to be working with George again. It’s been too long). I’m off with a camera to search for a cover pic. My friend Jerry McTague is gonna put the artwork together for me. Then, we’ll make it available to the digital world. For years I gave my music away for free via downloads. I made a lot of friends this way, but alas, no money. Imagine that? So no more freebies. Besides, what’s $10 among friends?

Excited about this one. I know I say that about all of ’em but still, this time I mean it even more.

In a bit..

–tf

Got an email today with the link to this video of my song “Remembering Bobby Sands” from a few years back. Came out really good. Not sure who did it but many thanks…

Buy the CD. It’s got really loud noises on it.

Read about it here. Liner Notes here. Listen for free here.

Wanna go back? Lyrics are here

Hard to argue the point. Lyrics are here.

Hey….somebody has to. Right? These are the types of things insomniacs think about when all of you normal people are sleeping. Lyrics are here.

Wrote this after attending a Red Barons game with my daughter and noticing the pitcher who seemed old enough to be the father of some of the kids on the team. Lyrics are here. I’ve done this song live lots of times but never recorded it.

Yesterday was the anniversary, not today. But I didn’t feel like thinking on it yesterday. Enough was being said. I just wanted to listen.

But today is the day after. Not sure if any of us remember the moment we woke up on the 12th. What were we thinking then? Surely that the world had somehow shifted….but nobody could have imagined by how much.

In 2001 I worked in a tiny rented office with 2 other guys. Eventually, both of them got whacked. So it was just me in there. Two small rooms and a fax machine that got ruined when the toilet on the next floor overflowed and spilled shit and piss all over it. All I had for company was a CD player and my dog. I miss Kiko. She died a few years ago. Her ashes are in my china closet and buried in the backyard, only because I could never find any way to wear them around my neck without looking like a girl. Anyway, she was the greatest dog ever. I have a dog now too. She’s the second greatest dog ever.

My sister called me and said something about plane and the World Trade Center. She wasn’t hysterical or anything. Just really confused…watching it unfold while it happened. It was before the 2nd plane hit, and I think everybody thought it was some sort of freak accident. I tried to get to CNN.com but the site was overloaded. Made sense. Lots of people were curious. So I hung up and waited for more news. I figured there’d be an explanation.

Then another call. A second plane. What the fuck? I think my Mom called me too. She was getting her hair done…and was watching the TV in the beauty parlor.

The office next door was a doctor or an insurance company or something like that. I never really paid that much attention. But I’d seen the lady who worked in there a few times and we’d say hello back and forth. She must have thought I was a bookie or something….alone in an office all day with a dog and a smelly fax machine. But I went over and she was listening to the news on the radio. Nobody ever went in there so she was alone at the front desk. Her husband had called her and told her something was happening. She mentioned something about more planes. Still in the air. The US capital. The White House. What the fuck?

Then I remembered. I had a CD player in my office. A boom box. Old fashioned now but the thing did have a radio. I’d forgotten. So I went back over and turned to NPR I think. That’s when I heard.

The voice said one tower had fallen. And then another. It didn’t register. Fallen? Like a drunk on the sidewalk? Maybe they meant to say the roof on one of the floors had collapsed or something. It was too much to get my head around. So I just heard what I wanted to hear. After a while I think I even turned the radio off and got some work done. My mind just sort of disengaged. I know people say they’ll never forget where they were when they heard the news, and that’s true. I can’t forget that either. But the hours after I heard it are hazy. I can’t remember feeling anything other than bewilderment. The Tali-hoo? Osama bin who? At the time these words didn’t exist in our lexicon.

When I got home I turned on the TV.

It took seeing it to make it real. They were “gone”. Literally. Rubble. You could see the smoke from space. Remember hearing that info for the first time?

The Pentagon. And western Pennsylvania. All the planes were accounted for now. The country was already in lock-down mode. Everybody was calling everybody else, even though there wasn’t anything you could say. You just wanted to feel connected to someone. I can’t imagine having to go through that day isolated and alone.

But I think back on it now and wonder why I had to, quite literally, see it to believe it. It’s not that I didn’t trust what the radio was telling me. It’s just that the images they were trying to convey were not available in my head. I think part of being an American comes with it a sense of invulnerability. We fight wars yes. But we fight them over there. Bombs go off sure. But they go off over there. People die. But they die over there. And there is anyplace but here.

It was such a quaint little notion….to use a Bush-ism. Remember when Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and lost by about a billion votes because everybody, in their heart, knew he was nuts? Man, those were the days weren’t they?

Now we get stripped searched to board a plane and oversee a gulag in Cuba. Did a pack of wild-eyed virgins with box cutters really lead to all….this?

Battle ground states in the last few elections are laid out the same as they were 1861. In case you forgot, that’s when we killed each other to the tune of 600,000 plus. In order to form a more perfect union.

In short, September 11th 2001 has made us batshit crazy. We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore. So we’re gonna blame somebody, and dammit it if you ain’t with us you’re with the terrorists. And by the way lets burn out them lesbians across the street and firebomb Planned Parenthood.

Used to be all we worried about was the communists. I guess they don’t make commies anymore?

We need an enemy. Enemies make the world go ’round. Economies are built on them. Fortunes are made…and lost. It’s dreadfully important to the bottom line. Unfortunately for the vast majority, peace is not profitable.

We sure as shit have an enemy now. And that makes it so easy, especially when their fringe starts doing what fringes usually do (and really….you must choose a deity with thicker skin…no?). We’ve gotten ourselves immersed in 2 full blown wars and numerous skirmishes since that day in September….and the opposition party is tugging at the leash to have at Iran. The body count thus far is exponentially higher than the tally of the towers. But, that’s the price of doing business I guess.

I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it myself.

In a bit…

–tf