I’ve been doing a lot of introspective soul-searching lately, trying to figure out where I want to end up in the next 5, 10, 15 years. I feel like I’ve carved out a pretty reasonable career as a web developer, but every now and then I find myself at a real loss to find any sort of personal satisfaction in what is supposed to be my main endeavor. This leads me to think of four years ago, the last time I was on stage playing my guitar in front of people. I was pretty mediocre, but damn it was fun; it was a hell of a lot more fun than sitting in a cube staring at lines of code all day. And although I’ll never be able to replace my current career with one in music, I keep thinking that maybe I can supplement my job with a few acoustic shows around town.

Anyhoo, my longing for the limelight is sort of besides the point here. My roommate just recently purchased a new, pretty sweet, locally made guitar and that lead me to pick mine up again. In an almost eery coincidence, my friend, who I used to play with, told me he’d just put together a home recording studio and that I should drop by and lay some stuff down. I hadn’t recorded anything in five years or so and hadn’t recorded with proper equipment in almost 10, so with a newly charged interest in music and an opportunity to record I called him up and we recorded a song.

I refer to it as a “classic” in the title of this post and obviously it isn’t that, it’s just one of my old standards called Limelight & Tequila. I wrote it four years ago and maintain that it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written. Not to say it’s some sort of masterpiece, but I always thought something just sort of clicked lyrically in it.

This will make the third time it’s been recorded and the first time in 4 years. This is probably the best it’s ever sounded, however, the performance is still pretty rough. The guitar was done in two scrappy pieces and the lyrics were done in one shot. And it’s all compounded by the fact that I can not, for the life of me, play with a click-track. Even with my raw, sort of amateurish performance, my friend, the audio engineer whizz, really brought out the best in it and me. I did notice a couple of things after listening to this version, though: It’s too long and it needs to be rearranged. Maybe someday I’ll get to that…

So, for a lack of any other way to present it to the general public, I now throw it up on my blog for you all to enjoy and/or crucify:

Download audio file (limelight_and_tequila.mp3)