The idea for an album is born …

I want to tell you how Q.R. Station came about and how the concept for the forthcoming album No Standing was formulated.

I only started playing guitar about four years ago, which really isn’t that long ago. When I started, I just wanted to be able to play songs that I loved, mainly rock music, and to attempt to sing along. I started by learning some basic chords and when I first started to strum my favorite songs I was absolutely hooked. From that point forward I couldn’t put the guitar down. Then I tried to learn how to sing while I played, which is definitely one of those two-sides of the brain activities that doesn’t go well at first. But with a lot of patience and determination I was able to get that one down. So for about a year I set about learning as many songs as I could that I really wanted in my song arsenal. We’re talking Beatles, U2, Lenny Kravitz , Matchbox Twenty, Dylan, Springsteen, and a bunch of others. That is how I would learn new things on the guitar – just by picking a new song and trying to master it. All of this was self taught. Other than a handful of suggestions from folks that had played guitar at one time or the other, it was just me picking up the guitar and trying to figure out how to play it. I would punish a few select family and friends by forcing them to listen to me. They were patient and they were actually pretty honest. There were a few times when these guys just burst out laughing at me, which on the one hand you might consider mean but on the other it really does make you pay attention to detail and try to get better. In fact, I knew I was making progress when the laughter stopped. One good friend from a group called Allied Folk started dragging me to open-mic’s. So only about a year into this thing I’m being dragged in front of people and doing it live – just me with a guitar and a good dose of fear. But one thing about the guitar playing community, they are some of the nicest and most generous people you will ever meet and they were all incredibly encouraging (except for one *ssh*le who laughed at my yellow guitar case – I wanted to punch that dude).

So this kept going for about three years – I even wrote a few songs just to see if I could do it. They seemed okay but there was certainly room for more song-writing development. This brings us to March 2006. At this point I had two guitars, the first an electric guitar that my girl bought for me before I knew a single chord (here’s a shout out to my girl, who is responsible for me playing music at all), and the second an acoustic. I needed some guitar strings so I headed to the local music store. There was nobody in there but the store clerks, so I took the opportunity to try out some guitars for the fun of it. I had been thinking that eventually I would add a Les Paul to my family when I could afford it (years down the road) so I grabbed a few Epiphone Les Paul’s and tried out some of those. Honestly, they didn’t seem that special. Maybe if I had been playing Gibson’s I would have really heard a difference. I grabbed a good five to ten guitars and tried them out and not one of them stood out. It was time to get rolling out of there and I was getting ready to make a move when I saw that a beautiful orange-red solid wood guitar was sitting right behind me all that time. I figured I would try it out so I plugged it into a pretty simple 15W amp and gave it a few strums. Holy sh*t, now I could hear a difference! This guitar had a beautiful rich sound to it and clearly had a unique blues/rock sound that stood out from anything else. It was a used Schecter guitar – a PT Custom model that is no longer made. I must have played that thing for an hour or more testing out all the different settings and this was clearly something I needed to have. Being used, it made it slightly more affordable and was way more affordable than a Gibson Les Paul. Well, I did come home with strings that day – there just happened to be a guitar attached to them.

About a week later I left with my girl for a trip to Mexico City to visit a friend. We spent a lot of time checking out the city and some amazing areas nearby. We saw the pyramids at Teotihuacan and some hieroglyphic artwork. Somehow that touched a chord of the artistic side of me. We also went to the theatre in Mexico City and saw a music and dance performance featuring many different regions and cultures of Mexico. The music was live, performed by about a ten piece band of musicians performing with guitars, violins, percussion, and a huge marimba played by about three musicians simultaneously. Between the band, which really showed me what real musicians look and sound like, and the dance performers, I felt really inspired by their performance and once again was feeling really connected with my artistic self. But the highlight of the trip was definitely a visit to Frida Kahlo’s home, which is now a museum. That place really blew me away. This is a woman who experienced great joy and also tremendous pain in her life. You could see every bit of all of her emotions, good and bad, in her work. One piece in particular stood out to me, a self portrait that had a human heart in it and it was literally breaking. Now I’m talking a real human heart, not the heart-shape used in Valentine candy. I was trying to imagine the pain she must have been feeling in order to paint something like that, and then also her ability to transport those feelings straight into her work. As someone who had been learning to perform and to find a way to perform with feeling and passion, I was really aware of the presence of that ability in Frida’s work. I was amazed.

Now when I travel on vacation I’ll always grab a couple of books that I can enjoy on the plane and in the downtime of the trip. I had recently purchased Bob Dylan’s autobiography in an airport bookstore and brought it along. I’m not a huge Dylan fan – I mean I like all of his classics and can certainly recognize the impact the man has had on his time, but I’m not spinning Dylan cd’s very often. But it seemed like an interesting read so I brought it along. I think Dylan must have been inspired by the beat writers back in the day, because he has that drifting style to his writing. It was cool though, and there were definitely some intriguing insights for me, given that I had been trying to learn how to be a musician and had written some songs. I was interested in where he gained inspiration (a serious Woody Guthrie fixation in the early days) and the path he took as an aspiring artist. In fact, his Woody fixation was a great insight for me and in many ways a great relief. For awhile in his younger days all he wanted to play was Guthrie songs, and he had to be jolted out of that fixation after awhile. Well I have been accused of having an unhealthy fixation on U2 and spent a lot of time learning many of their songs. Reading about Dylan’s path made me believe that perhaps my devotion to U2 wasn’t really unhealthy and that ultimately it may serve me well in a similar way to how Guthrie bridged some gaps for Dylan. But there was one particular moment that stands out when I was reading this book in Mexico City.

Now bear in mind that the visit to Mexico had been very inspirational to this point in an artistic sense. Not only did we visit these amazing places that really inspired me, but our friend’s sister is an actress in Mexico who is just starting out. Her devotion to her craft was really palpable and along with all the other surroundings, really fit in with my feeling of artistic inspiration. Now add to that the fact that I’m reading about one of the most relevant folk/rock musicians in music history and you can get a sense of the feeling of artistic awe that I had at the time. Then I’m reading a particular passage from Dylan where he says “On my first album …” . That phrase just stopped me in my tracks. I put the book down and thought about that phrase. How cool is it to be able to say “On my first album”, which by its very words implies that there were many others. I thought about that for a minute and decided that I wanted to be able to say that. I wanted to be able to say “On my first album…”.

At that moment, the first spark of Q.R. Station was born. I decided right then and there in Mexico that I was going to make a rock album. Now I didn’t have a record contract and certainly not the finances to bring myself into the studio. But I had a really outstanding blues/rock guitar waiting for me at home and I had dabbled with the free recording software Audacity, so I knew that I had some equipment that would enable me to do it myself. I figured the guitar was certainly good enough to record with, so why not. It wasn’t like I was trying to make an album that would sell a million copies. That’s not what it was about – all I wanted to do was make an album, even if nobody ever listened to it, so that I could also say one day “On my first album”. So on that day in Mexico, the idea was formed and sealed – I made a promise to myself that I would undertake and finish this project.

Thanks for reading such a long story. More to come later …

QR

Welcome to Q.R. Station

Welcome to Q.R. Station. The first question, of course, is ‘What is Q.R. Station’. Q.R. Station is a concept, a group, a project – in effect, it’s a few things wrapped together. And it evolves every day. I hope you will take the journey along with Q.R. Station, as I think it will be an exciting journey. But let’s get away from the abstract and get just a little more clarity here.

Q.R. Station is currently a very small group that is working on its first rock and roll album. The idea for the album, “No Standing”, came about in March 2006. It’s a year later and we are getting ready to release our first single, “Walk Next To Me”. In the coming entries of this blog, I will explain how the concept for this group and this album came about. I think it’s an interesting story, one that I hope will get you interested enough to follow our journey through the process of making our first album. Please check out the blog from time to time to see how the journey is evolving, and keep an eye out for www.qrstation.com (currently under construction), where our first single will be released sometime in April 2007.

Thanks,

QR