Front Porch Poetry Vol. 1 – Signed CD

ABOUT THE ALBUM:

The 2-part album Front Porch Poetry started as a series of demos I created in order to flesh out some songs I had written for various projects, including a new record with my band members and longtime collaborators The New Relics.

But as I started filling out these arrangements, I really began to enjoy stretching my abilities with instruments that I’m not particularly comfortable with—drums, bass, piano, slide guitar, and anything else I could get my hands on—as well as the technical side of mixing and mastering an album.

I’ve played many of these songs with the guys in the band, so naturally their talented and insightful approach to these tunes has influenced the arrangements you hear, and I look forward to recording some of them as The New Relics soon. But I’ve really enjoyed the process of creating something completely on my own--it just feels so personal.

I’ve always felt that my strength as a musician is in my writing. I love this handful of songs deeply, and I hope you will as well.

Two of them in particular, “The Watch My Daddy Left Behind” and “The Last Cowboy”, are very personal stories of the loss of my grandfather and my father. “Some of Mine” is a love song to my younger self, while “Different Kind Of Crazy” is a love song to my wife. I wrote “Miles To Go” for a friend of mine who took it along with a few of my other songs to be recorded in Nashville a few years back. And “The Only Vice That Ever Quit Me” was heavily inspired and influenced by the phenomenal songwriter Jason Isbell (as well as another writer you may have heard of, Ernest Hemingway).

So what you hear on this album—for better or worse—is straight from my brain through my hands and into your ears. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

~Michael J. Arbogast