Going To Philadelphia

“Going to Philadelphia” is a song of exuberance about going to pick up the custom made guitars that we used on this album by John Zeidler, the master craftsman we met through Joe’s friend Wade who lived in Philadelphia. As mentioned in the “Song For The Princess” description, our guitars were made by John. “Going to Philadelphia” was about the excitement of a creation, a beautiful thing, very rare and wonderful. Being with Joe to actually get these guitars was also wondrous.

The song in many ways is a feature of the bass, a duet between the melody that the guitar and the harmonica play together and the bass response. The guitar is featured more in the middle section. Again, I was drawn to the 7/4 time signature for that section. I wanted to have a Gipsy Kings like sound in the middle section. We used a tambourine I made from three tambourines, (Joe and I are not really all that fond of tambourines, some funny stories about that someday.) One of the tambourines I got at Green Lake came from India. I duck taped it together with a couple tambourines that I owned, kind of gluing them together to create one tambourine sound.

We also had the honor of playing one of my good friend Kevin Comfort’s cajons that he builds, called the Comfort Cajons. They are smaller ones, built to be portable, that you can connect a strap on and play. We used the cajon for the sixteenth note pattern throughout the song. It’s a super fast part to keep the momentum of being on a road trip, the movement of the vehicle towards Philadelphia. It created of a nice contrast with our melody.

In the middle section we had the cajon play this fast 7 pattern TaKa TaKa TaKeTa (Say this quickly and you have 7). I learned this way of representing 7 from a Don Ellis clinic, a jazz trumpeter who was famous for writing in odd meters. He spoke of how the musicians of India represented odd meters phonically. The Gipsy Kings hand claps mimicked the TaKa TaKa TaKeTa pattern. Then Larry also did the upbeats at a pretty brutal speed. There were lots of layers of hand claps doing that pattern, a testament to the brilliance of Larry.

The guitar was featured in that middle section. It really brought out the beauty of that guitar. I was really thrashing on that section. It was a duet with the percussion with the bass beautifully filling the bottom and the harp doing an obbligato over the top leading us back into the melody.

I wanted the harp sound to be like a concertina, a Cajun like accordion sound. It sounded great with the the arrangement. Joe once again did a great job locking in with me playing the melody and playing the harmonica in octaves.

I wanted to increase the energy at the end of the song. I couldn’t resist adding the B-3 organ part in there and eventually have it join in on the 16th notes to make the picture that we had arrived at our destination, John Zeidler’s home.

We had been there before to order the guitars. It was super exciting to be able to pick them up. What a great trip and what great instruments. It was a truly sad moment when John passed away from leukemia at the age of 44. He made a handful of guitars, mandolins and he also made cellos. He was definitely a master luthier and as you can hear by the quality of those guitars sounds. You can see why we were excited to actually own them. I always wanted to do them justice. It was truly an honor to play these guitars on this album. So “Going to Philadelphia” is a song of thankful exuberance and tribute to a sensei.