Jay Stott

I hate Halloween. 

Really, it sucks. For two reasons. 

One, as a committed ex-drinker, Halloween is like some of the other big holidays (New Years, St. Pattys). It's amateur night. Everyone thinks they're going big, but for us ex-pros, if you weren't drinking like that on any random Tuesday, you weren't my kind of drinker. So I find all the party noise annoying. 

Two, and this one is much more personal, it's hard enough for me to go day to day in my own skin. This whole costume thing never worked for me. I'm…

Aaaand, we're back to bad puns on a monthly basis. 

But yes, it's pretty hot out there right now. I managed to do a little repair on the sprinklers this morning before it got too heated. 

Heat or no, we're goin to the fair this week! Boulder County Fair, that is. The oldest county fair in Colorado. Fried food, animals, and a ton of great music. We're on Thursday at 4pm- kicking off a great evening that ends with our Colorado faves- The Gasoline Lolipops. Our friend Taylor Shea is playing with her band on…

A huge thank-you to everyone who came out on Saturday for the release show, and everyone who sent messages or left comments. The support is much appreciated. 

We did have a rockin' good time, and while I din't have it in me to set up streaming for the show, we did take a lot of video. So for those of you who feel like you missed out (and you did), make yourself a sandwich, turn up the volume, and enjoy the whole first set on youtube! I left all the bad jokes and rambling stories. It's almost like being…

Final Episode!

What road are we one? Where are we going? Is there a map? Who knows. Not me.

One Angel Wing is out today- you can stream it all the places you get music. I'll leave the OAW t-shirts up for as long as I have them, which won't be too much longer I think, and CDs and vinyl will, of course, be available. 

The last song on the record, ‘The Road We’re On,' was written the longest ago. About ten years. Maybe more. I'm not sure. We've played it live on and off, and I've always kept it around. This was…

Where are we from? Where am I from?

What does that even mean?

My mother's side of the family is from Delaware and Pennsylvania. My father's side is from Virginia and North Carolina. I grew up all over the place. I was born in Pennsylvania, lived overseas as a kid, spent my adolescence in the midwest, and have lived in Colorado on and off for thirty-five years now. In my family history are plantation owners, confederate soldiers, Quakers and abolitionists. Thats quite a mix. 

I'm a fifty-seven year old white…

Episode Eight of The Story Behind The Song!

Get in the damn van. 

This song, Econoline Van, pretty much wrote itself except for one part. The prompt in my songwriting group was ‘econoline van,’ and I was off and running from the get go. Really I just listed out a bunch of musician stories, and wrote a chorus. The ford E350 was a staple of the music world for a really long time. Basically a can with a motor, it was cheap, reliable (sort of), simple, and functional. It was not unusual to have six or seven…

Episode Seven of Story Behind The Song

In the winter of 2021, we were all mid-pandemic. I was working from home at my then day-job, my kid was going to school from home, we were all hanging around an awful lot. 

My friend and colleague David Coile, a terrific songwriter and raconteur over in Longmont, had a podcast called Raw Songwriting. The podcast really focused on the nuts and bolts of songwriting- David would send the guest a prompt, both David and the guest would write a song to the prompt, and the…

Episode Six of The Story Behind The Song

Have you ever had it with all the advetising? The constant vomit stream of bullshit? Yeah, me too. In the fall of 2020 (incedentally in the middle of an election cycle when the bullshit was at peak bull), I had one of those moments. I find the political bull especially nauseating. The idea that it's all 'messaging' kinda makes me want to puck or riot, dempinding on the day. 

So I wa splaying with this little blusey guitar riff in A. Nothing ground breaking, sounded…

Welcome to Episode 5 of the story behind the song!

This week I'm looking at 'Mostly What We Ain't' which was released as a single about a year and a half ago. I wrote this song as a part of my songwriting group (shout out group!) several years ago. The prompt that day was 'selfless loving saints.'

Yeah. I saw that and thought ‘nope.’ We aint' that. And the song was off from there. It's fun to lean into a very misanthropic point of view sometime, though I'm mostly a pretty positive guy. But sometimes people…

Story Behind the Song: Ep 4

Ah, trains, and blues, And trains. What a great combo. 

Sometimes you just get messing around with a riff on the guitar and come up with a song to go with it. That's pretty much what happened here. Blues as a form is deeply embedded in my thinking as a player and a writer. I'm not saying I'm great, but blues and blues influenced rock have always been something I really loved. 

The speaker of this little narrative, is, of course, a classic unreliable narrator. It isn't the train that…