You never know what will happen at an open mic:

Our performance Saturday night at the Foundry Arts Show was, in our estimation, a smashing success. Our thanks to everyone who came out to see us play, and thanks also to the Foundry Artists Association for having us back.

If you missed it, you still have a chance; we’re playing again on Friday from 5-8pm. Pictures from the show are up on the photos page!

So, I totally thought that the concept of rhyming “mistress” and “Christmas” was really original, and then I found out that there’s an ACDC song about wanting a mistress for Christmas.  I haven’t actually heard the song, but I’m guessing it’s pretty different from this one.

This is part three of four of our holiday offering.  I was trying to channel late 60′s / early 70′s Dolly, Tammy Wynette, and Loretta on this one.  I always get really excited about the spoken word parts.  Cheesy?  Maybe.  But awesome.  I also love the whole one-take aspect of this recording.  It’s like you’re in Matt’s basement with us!  So download the song now!  There are mere days left before Christmas!

Last Christmas, when the band was just getting together, before we even had a name, our friend Ed literally bounded up to us, vibrating with visible excitement. “You guys have got to do this John Denver Christmas song.”

Oh, we told him, we’re actually already working on “Christmas for Cowboys,” and it sounds really nice.

“No, you have to hear this one. It’s called ‘Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas).’”

Well, a song with a title like that pretty much sells itself, doesn’t it? A quick check of “Rocky Mountain Christmas” later, and we were hooked. Our first response, like I imagine yours will be, was hilarity, but in light of John Denver’s life story, it soon began to seem a bit more poignant, which (let’s be honest) is Ten Years Too Late’s bread and butter.

Just today, doing a Google search to find out more about the song, I found that it’s no longer quite the undiscovered gem we thought it was. The fricking Decemberists put out a version in November. The Decemberists! Totally copying our idea! I shall choose to be flattered.

So, here it is, for Ed, our tribute to the late, great John Denver, Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas). Enjoy.

So, everyone seems to be doing a Christmas album. Even Rachael Ray has a Christmas album, which makes me need to go lie down for a little while.

Anyway, Ten Years Too Late are not immune to the holiday spirit. We’ve recorded a dazzling quartet of Yuletide-inspired songs for you to listen to and enjoy. First up, one written by little ol’ me.

This is a song about being alone at Christmas, which is ironic because I’m happily married. And Jewish. I suppose it’s really a song about being sad when everyone else is happy, or about the bittersweet feeling when all of your friends go home for the holidays, or about how awesome Tracie is on the tambourine. Anyway, ’tis a kicky little number, with a charmingly familiar fiddle part, and I think you’ll like it.

Why don’t you download It’s Christmastime (And I Don’t Care) and see?

This, my friends, is a song about Santa Claus.  No, no, I’m just kidding.  All of the Santa songs will be unleashed in due time.  I mean, I guess this song could be about Santa, though, if Santa is an old, kind of addled guy who you see walking around town all the time.  This song sounds more intriguing with every word I write, doesn’t it?

This song — well, the chorus, actually — was initially inspired by a friend’s dog, who is named Willie, but once I started the verses it became about something else entirely.  I guess the heart of it is the notion that you can never really know what’s going on in another person’s mind, body or heart.  It’s easy to make assumptions about people based on what we see, but we’ll never have any idea about the reality of their lives.  And when it comes down to it, we’re all wandering.

In addition to our usual line-up — Matt on guitars (including the solo!) and harmony vocals, me on mandy and lead vocals, and Stephanie on a really stellar bit of fiddle — we’d be remiss if we didn’t give credit to special guest Rachel Spaulding on the bad-ass hand claps.  Now stop reading and go download Willie.

So, apparently I write a lot of sad songs. In fact, my back catalogue is so full of them that I’m going to release a rarities and b-sides album called Sad, Sad, Sad. And then a follow-up album called, Yep, Still Sad. And then a greatest hits album simply called, The Saddest. But what’s the fun in a happy song? People all over the world are in pain of one sort or another, and the last thing they want to hear about is how awesome someone else’s life is. The Buddha said that the first noble truth is that life means suffering, and then He invented country music to share that message with the masses.

In any case, someone once asked me if this song was a true story. And my response was, “It’s someone’s true story.” The conceit isn’t particularly original — you try to convince yourself that you’re okay with losing someone, but the only way that this can be true is if the whole world is upside down. Right is left, black is white, and you’re doing just fine. It’s like Opposite Day on a grand scale of heartbreak. But I hope that I’ve brought something worthwhile to this genre of songs — an image or melody, a turn of phrase. A particular kind of ache.

I really enjoy singing this song because I get to be all smoky and mellow during the verses and then bust out during the choruses. It’s pretty cathartic to step about five feet back from the microphone and just kind of yell for a little bit. This is why Steven Tyler seems so content all the time. Matt plays really beautiful guitar on this song and adds the perfect harmony at just the right moments, and Stephanie has another lovely solo on the violin (or as I try to make her call it, the fiddle). And that’s me playing the wistful-sounding mandolin. You may not be aware of this yet, but the mandolin is a bad-ass instrument.

So now go grab yourself a box of tissues, click on the link, and enjoy yourself an earful of Maybe.

This is a song about questions. It’s a song about family and about history.

“Promised Country” is loosely based on the poorly-remembered story I was told about how my great-grandmother, Gussie, came to this country. It had an emotional impact, of course, but the details, like so many of the details of my family’s history, are fuzzy. Unfortunately, my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother are no longer alive to corroborate, so we’re left with something like a legend. Which is ok: legends make for interesting songwriting.

This song was written while at a writing retreat under the inspirational influence of Nerissa Nields. Very little changed from the first draft to the final version, except of course that Tracie and Stephanie each added their own special brand of awesome. (I sometimes think it needs a bridge, or something, to give it a little more shazam, but nothing’s come to me yet.)

Give Promised Country a listen, won’t you?

So, when Tracie had the idea to release a song a week on our website, and include a little explanatory post along with each, I didn’t realize she planned to make the first one so good.

Long Way Back is a song about nostalgia, obviously. Hell, it even has the word “nostalgia” in it. Not one for layers of hidden meaning, am I? Nostalgia, and regret, and thoughts about what was and what could have been are a pretty significant theme for me, one I find myself returning to often in my songwriting, but I don’t know why. I like my life; I don’t have lots of regrets. It’s possible, it seems, to be actually quite content in one’s life and still look back on the past with a certain amount of wistful longing.

This song came together very quickly. I wrote the chorus first, I think, and then the verse music. I was searching for lyrics in the verses, and I confess that I cannibalized two earlier and less good songs for words on this one. They’re happier here. (This is also one of, as of this writing, three songs of mine with a lyric like “secret songs.” I need to cut that out.) When Tracie came up with her harmonies, it kicked this song into a whole new gear, and the violin entering on the choruses always makes me so glad to have written it. And, oddly enough, Long Way Back becomes kind of a rocker when we play it live.

I hope it will make you feel a bit wistful, but in a good way. Let us know you like Long Way Back.

So, One More Stone is fundamentally a song about heartbreak. Will heartbreak ever go out of style? Probably not as long as people are still falling in love. It’s about the sort of thunk of inevitability that some relationships have, when you just have to chalk it up to experience or disillusionment. This is one of the more personal songs I’ve ever written, which is probably telling you too much already. It’s also, I think, the only song I’ve written that sometimes makes me cry when I sing it. So, like, it’s probably not the song that you want to play if you’re looking to pep yourself up. But if you’re sad and you want to wallow a little bit, I think you’ve found a winner.

I remember sitting out on my back porch when I wrote this. It was fall, and I had my guitar, and finally worked out that chorus which I had been humming for weeks. I had that central image of the wishing well in my head, but I didn’t know how to begin the song. So then I looked around at my backyard, where trees were doing their best to hang on to those last orange leaves, but the angle of the sun and the chill in the air meant that you couldn’t ignore the inevitability of change. So that’s when I came up with, “The leaves have fallen though the summer tried.” We hang on to hope as long as we can, but the world turns around us regardless.

Matt and Stephanie play absolutely beautifully on this, and we we sing it I’m always so glad when Matt’s harmony kicks in on the second chorus. Take a listen to One More Stone. We hope that you enjoy it!