I almost called it Chinese Rolex. I’m almost called it that because the phrase appears in my song “Taylor Swift,” which is, like a lot of songs on the album, written from the point of view of someone who is a lot like me, which is to say one of the lucky ones. I have somehow found myself, more or less at mid-life, doing O.K., with a woman I love, good dogs and a few nice guitars. Like someone once said, “I ain’t hiding from nobody, nobody’s hiding from me.” Anyway, the guy in “Taylor Swift” is talking about his older brother, one of those guys for whom things haven’t worked out quite as well. He’s not starving, except maybe spiritually, and he’s collected a few signifying accoutrements of American masculine striving, namely “an Italian shotgun and a Chinese Rolex.” And without delving too deep into my own metaphors, I think it’s pretty obvious that the Rolex is fake. It only looks like quality. Pop it open and you find the same old cheap innards as any other watch you’d buy on the sidewalk. But it keeps time. And from five or ten feet away, no one notices the difference. It works until it doesn’t. This album is a little bit like that watch. Maybe. This is a record by a journalist. By a rock critic. By a guys who writes columns for a newspaper. I play guitar and I've written songs and I used to play in bands, but I was never interested in being a rock star or a performer. I'm really just the writer. And while my name is on it, but it’s really the product of a few really wonderful and generous musicians, who helped a songwriter realize a petty dream. I wanted to make a record — and I’ve actually made a couple before, mainly by myself and mainly for my own amusement. I’m a writer. And I since I was a young teenager I’ve written songs. Not for me to sing or to perform necessarily, though I had a little experience playing in bands when I was a kid. I learned the five guitar chords everybody learns. I sang a little. I was in glee club. I was in musicals. (When I was in 8th grade I played Albert Peterson in a production of Bye Bye Birdie — I sang “Put On a Happy Face.” I am glad that was before the age of ubiquitous digital video.) Nobody threw anything, but nobody ever told me I was a great singer either. I fooled around in bands in the late ’70s and ’80s, and sometimes I would sing. It was always reluctantly — I’m not that wild about my own voice. But I did it. I even cut a record back in 1986, with my own band. (It was produced by Tom Ayres, a great guy who signed David Bowie to his RCA contract.) But that was an anomaly. I was always more a songwriter. I probably could have become a serviceable guitar player but my only real interest in the instrument was as a writing tool. I needed to play well enough to come up with chord progressions to accompany the melodies on which I strung my lyrics. That was all. I am a pretty good songwriter. I had some success. I won a national contest in 1981, and my co-writer on that song moved to Nashville and worked as a combine songwriter for a while. For a few years in the early ’80s, I had a really good partnership with a singer-songwriter named Pete Ermes who played clubs in Shreveport and sometimes beyond. Pete was a sophisticated musician, and we wrote a lot together — probably close to a hundred songs. He performed most of them. Then he moved to Florida, and for a while I briefly fronted my own band. It was a pretty talented group, we cut the tracks for Tom, we did a video — Tom got his friend Rodney Bingenheimer to play our stuff on his radio show in Los Angeles. But I wasn’t really interested in playing clubs; I had a pretty good day job. I eventually drifted away from performing. But I kept writing. But songwriting starts to feel like a fairly empty exercise when you’ve got no one performing your songs. So every once in a while, I’d come out of the closet and play a song or two, always making sure that people understood I didn’t consider myself a singer or a guitar player, that I was just doing my best to present these songs I’d written. Fast forward, say 20 years. My old bass player from my Shreveport band, a wonderful guy named Ed Hughens, called me up and told me he was working with a young band that was playing our old songs. He wanted to know if I had any new ones. Of course I did. I sent him some. He liked them. So I started to write some more. This led to an album I put out on my own in 2013, which Dave Hoffpauir, and old friend and magnificent drummer heard. At the time he urged me to let him assemble some musicians and make a proper recording of the songs. Three years later, executive producer (my wife) Karen Martin said I should try it. So Dave called some of his friends, I gathered up about 40 relatively recent songs and we occupied Fellowship Hall Sound — located a few blocks from where I live in the People’s Republic of Hillcrest, in the great city of Little Rock, Arkansas— for a few days. This is what we came up with: “$5,000 Guitar” — A tribute, of sorts, to my old songwriting buddy, Pete, who died in 2007. “Lee Atwater’s Blues” — A song about a guy who did a lot to shape our nation’s politics. He introduced me to future president George W. Bush a long time ago. “You Could Be in California” — A true story. “Wes Parker in Paris” — A baseball song inspired by my friend Michael Leahy’s excellent book about the Los Angeles Dodgers, The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers. “Euclid Avenue” — Frank Lloyd Wright, Edwin Cheney and the perquisites of genius. “Something for the Pain” — Let’s try to write a real country song. “Taylor Swift” — No doubt she’s a helluva kid. “So It Goes” — Nick Devlin resuscitated this one witha Danelectro 12-string part. “The Copy Editor” — “Except for the names and a few other changes, the story’s the same one.” “Levon and Robbie (Writer’s Demo)” — We ran out of time, so the band didn’t record this but it felt timely to me. “Closest Friend (Writer’s Demo)” — Consider this a bonus track. I want to thank the people who really made this record: The Expatriates who consist of Dave, who played drums, sang backup and produced; Shawn Stroope, who drove up from Shreveport to play bass on these tracks; Nick Devlin, the masterful guitarist (who also sang a bit and played an Omnichord) whose warmth, wit, taste and generosity informed every decision made on this record; Sir Randal Berry, our pocket Paul McCartney who played keyboards and gave his consul; and our host at Fellowship, Jason Weinheimer, who recorded, engineered and mixed these tracks while providing occasional instrumental flourishes. Paul Bowen sang some backing vocals as well as the bridge on “You Could Be in California.” Jim Hathaway played harmonica on “Something For the Pain.” Lee Tombulian played accordion on “The Copy Editor.” I’m playing by myself on “Closest Friend” and “Levon and Robbie,” which were recorded at strangepup music, also located in the PRH section of Little Rock.