minor swing by Django Reinhardt 2.3M     like a rolling stone by Bob Dylan 4.6M     love in vain by Bernard Chazelle (BC)           4.1M     cancun by BC 1.3M     mary had a little lamb       by Buddy Guy 2.6M     i left my baby by Count Basie 3.1M     in the city tonight by BC           5.1M     bright lights by BC 2.7M     insensatez by Antonio Carlos Jobim 2.4M     my funny valentine by R. Rodgers and L. Hart 2.2M     ella by BC 2.5M     wonderland by BC 4.2M     rock me baby       by BB King 3.2M     the sky is crying by Elmore James 3.2M     how long blues by Leroy Carr 5.2M     c'est la vie by Chuck Berry 3.4M     gotta play by BC 2.9M

• minor swing has the playful brilliance of a Mozart tune. But I ain't no Django, alas, and to get that baby swinging my fingers left me with no other option but reduce the original tempo by 20 percent. Check out Django's 1937 recording to hear how it's really supposed to be played.
  
• like a rolling stone is pounding, wall-to-wall schadenfreude at its rock & rolling best. No phat beats but dope rhymes aplenty. The first verse alone plays "time, fine, dime, prime... didn't you?" against "call, doll, fall, all... kiddin' you." Not bad.
  
• love in vain is my answer to the previous song.
  
• cancun acts as a coda in the same key of D minor. I duet with myself, one voice unplugged, the other not.
  
• On mary had a little lamb, I all but follow in the footsteps of two of my guitar heroes, Buddy Guy and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
  
• i left my baby is a Count Basie classic made famous by the incomparable Jimmy Rushing on vocals and Lester Young on tenor sax. My 2-chorus solo was inspired by Craig Handy's tenor work on "Kansas City."
  
• The title track, in the city tonight, riffs about a homeless Vietnam vet. The first song I ever wrote.
  
• bright lights is my attempt at Frank Sinatra meets Curtis Mayfield.
  
• insensatez is a Jobim classic and a custom-made vehicle for Stan Getz's lyricism. My apologies to Portuguese speakers for slaughtering their beautiful language.
  
• On my funny valentine, I followed Chet Baker's minimalist approach. A song to die for! What better reminder that Rodgers & Hart (and their cohorts, Kern, Berlin, Porter, Gershwin, etc) operated in a songwriting league of their own?
  
• ella (Fitzgerald) speaks of music and life on the road. Jazz mavens will spot the nods to Ellington (It don't mean a thing...) and Tatum (God is in the house). I did not play the piano part: Yamaha did.
  
• wonderland is the unplugged track of this album. Took me three hours to write, play, and produce. A nice change from 'love in vain,' which took me nearly a year.
  
• My inspiration for BB King's rock me baby was Tina Turner's gritty cover with Ike on (surprise) guitar.
  
• the sky is crying is a rite of passage for any blues guitarist: easy to play but hard to sing. Left on the cutting floor was an endless guitar solo that I distilled down to a few bars in the style of BB King and T-Bone Walker.
  
• how long blues is another blues standard.
  
• On c'est la vie, a Cajun-flavored song by the father of rock & roll, I borrowed a few country licks from Albert Lee that I spotted on Emmylou Harris' Luxury Liner album.
  
• The sendoff track, gotta play, is just an excuse for fooling around with a wah-wah pedal. Pity the poor pianists, violinists, cellists, etc, whose instruments do not let them goof off like that.

An Outdoor Gig on the Tufts Campus (SOCG '01) Playing with Deep Freyed outside of Boston in June 2001, with Bill Frey (vocals, guitar, harmonica), Matt Dickerson (bass), and Daniel Scharstein (drums and alto sax). Photo: Sariel Har-Peled.