As the old joke goes “I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken”.

I am a human being; thus I make mistakes. And since I am an independent musician who puts out his own recordings, there have been a few mistakes in the accompanying texts of some of these projects that have slipped by the editor. Er, wait – that’s me…

So to correct these errors as I find them, I’ve been meaning to put this page up for a some time but just haven’t gotten around to it until now. Here are a few of the mistakes. I will add more as I get to it.

– On my CD Everything Under The Sun – in the text about the inspiration for the tune Tenochtitlan, I inadvertently used the word Mayan when I should have used Aztec. I knew what I meant!

– On my CD Pictures – the tune Karl And August should have been Carl and August. The tune was inspired by the legendary luthiers the Carl and August Larsen. I should have caught that.

– Also on Pictures – in the Joplin Rag The Easy Winner, I inadvertently left out a whole section of the tune. Kind of dumb actually, but I did. I had arranged the entire tune years before from the piano music. As I began committing it to memory by taking the sheet music away from my view, somewhere in that process I forgot about the entire second section. And so I played it for years with 3 sections instead of the 4 it actually has. It still sounds fine — unless you know the tune. In the last year, I have relearned the second section of The Easy Winners and will likely include it on a future recording.

– On my CD No Net – the tune In Memory Of Joe LaMastro should have been In Memory Of Joe LoMastro. Actually, when I wrote the tune (which was based on a story I had been told) I did not know what the correct spelling was. I didn’t find out the spelling was incorrect until several years later.

– Speaking of No Net – some would say the whole cover was a mistake. It features me in tights when, in fact, I have never worn tights. My head looks funny on this cover too. I gave the artist free rein to do what she wanted to do with the cover art. I wasn’t crazy about it the first time I saw it but thought it would be wrong of me to go back on the terms I had agreed to. I liked the concept of what she had drawn, even if I wasn’t crazy about it made me look. Whatever. It’s still a good CD! 

– Some would also say that the Alert The Authorities CD – my all-vocal recording from 2008 – was a mistake, by its very existence. (Because the world didn’t need that much of my singing, blah, blah…). One mistake on that recording was that the song Just Like You is probably a little too “up” sounding in its delivery given its subject matter. Fortunately, most of the other tunes on this recording are strong performances, in my completely unbiased opinion.

– On my CD Cool Tunes For Harp Guitar – there is a knucklehead mistake that there is just no excuse for. I recorded Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie #1 on this recording (and a lovely version it is, if I may say so myself) – but in the liner notes, a photo of myself standing in front of Mr. Satie’s home in Honfleur, France is mentioned – as if it were there on the cover somewhere. By complete oversight, it is not.

– Sad to say, that I missed another spelling error on my Still On The Line CD. The word “tuning” came out “tunning” somehow in one spot in the liner notes.

– And another was just reported to me by my friend Frank Doucette. It’s on the More Beatles CD. In the liner notes for For No One, somewhere in the process, some info from the notes to Across The Universe got pasted in. The tuning for the sub-basses is the first line: E A B C# D F#

– I just remembered this one: On Guitar Town (from 1994), I listed the tune You Are My Sunshine as being a traditional piece. In fact, it was written by the former governor of Louisiana Jimmie Davis, along with a Charles Mitchell, and first recorded in 1939. I played it in a medley with the tune Redwing.

I’m sure there are – and will be – more of these as life goes on.

Best to all,
sb