Original songs from this award winning singer songwriter, ...a great train song, heart song, best dog song ever, memorable ballads. Food for the soul. Songs that feel like you already knew them. Includes performance collaborations with Jahmes Finlayson, Mandrell Cornett, Radislav Lorkovic, Harlan Jefferson, Richard Burgess, Biff Blumfumgagne, Carl & Diana Cole that formed the springboard for the formation of the popular world music ensemble, One Drum. "That's great stuff. "-Willie Nelson Users Guide to Moondog Anthology by the songwriter. I’m not sure I wrote these songs. It feels more like they wrote me. Some of the music dates back years in my life and was brought in to the Moondog project after the longest gestation on record (pun). Why not? Songs I’d written decades before could help me out in ways I could not have imagined. How lucky is that? Like buried treasure. I was thinking it is a good job to be a songwriter. Lets say you have a heck of a sad time and you think you’re not going to make it. Sorrow has no bottom. Your dog has died. You feel so bad you start writing poetry about it. Some of the phrases start repeating and lilting ‘til a tune wraps around it. You sing the same tune to the same words and start calling it a song. Your friends enjoy it for its unvarnished sorrow, or its catchy pulse, or its quirky attitude. Some of those people are musicians and then you have a band arrangement of the song that goes with the words that tell of the moment you were sure was the worst. Multi tracking is a narcissist’s dream. You sing a great emotional clear track, then you go back and sing along to yourself. That’s so much fun you do it again. Now you’ve got two of yourself backing yourself up. This is a good self esteem exercise. The finished recording of that song joins up with a set of your other recordings. Their job is to go out and make some new paths for you. One song becomes a favorite lullaby and young kids healing song. Thousands of people sing it over the coming years. Hundreds of deaf and hearing kids learn to sign it and that makes you weep tears of joy. Another ironic song gets some radio airtime and takes on a bit of a cult following. You get emails from people you never met saying it rocks and they can’t stop singing it. Two other songs make it onto the debut compilation CD of a popular touring ensemble you are part of. One of those songs becomes a standard show opener at concerts and assemblies across the US and sometimes beyond. Another song wins you a returning place in a music festival and opens up a new part of the country where you’d always wanted to spend time. It becomes a place you return every year for fifteen years, making new friends, and traveling further. As you arrive one evening in your Westy at a music festival, you hear a guitarist around a campfire playing your song to a group of folks. Because of the amazing musicians you meet, people from all over the world. You are inspired to spend a dozen years as a free lance music educator. Teaching the joy of music. You give performances to hundreds of thousands of kids, you design a curriculum around it and you help kids build hundreds upon hundreds of musical instruments every year. Over the next 15 years you sell reorders of the CD’s without ever paying a dime to promote it. The earnings make a big difference as you swing from trapeze to trapeze in life. Moondog has been a great experience. It's still going on. The questions and stories from Moondog Anthology are still real. Now it will be available song by song as digital downloads. Thanks for everything. David Brushes with greatness… One of the characters I worked with on Moondog was a guitar picker from Grand Detour Illinois named Mandrell Cornett. We had met at Willow Folk Festival in Stockton one summer and spent a year playing in places like Dixon and Chana with Steve Catron from Shabbona on bass. Mandrell and I co-wrote the song Rainbow. A little while later Mandrell moved to Arkansas he took along a bunch of the new CDs to see if he could stir up some business. Here’s his story to me: One day he was out coon hunting and met a neat old guy named David Lynn Jones. Back in 1986, Jones had a big hit with Willie Nelson, “Livin in the Promised Land.” Jones retired to Arkansas and built a studio. Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson were regulars. Mandrell got the call one day that Willie was hanging out at David’s studio over in Bayer and kicking back doin’ what they do. Would he like to come by? Mandrell hopped on over and joined the already mellow crew. There came an opportunity to put on the Moondog CD, which was listened thru and enjoyed. Afterwards Willie said, ”That’s great stuff, man.” But Mandrell didn’t think to ask if Willie was reeferring to the music or the bag of w**d on the table. Last I heard, Mandrell was working on a new aerosol product to sell in Arkansas called Rock Be Gone. For people who live at the end of dirt roads, you just pick up the rock, spray a bit where the rock was, chuck the rock off to the side of the road and it's guaranteed to not come back.