Bands
I have a long history playing and creating music. My first instrument was accordion at the age of 8 but that didn’t last long. My interest in playing sports was stronger so I abandoned accordion lessons in favor of outdoor pursuits. Around the age of 18 I casually took up the acoustic guitar and the electric bass, both of which I played sporadically over the next decade, though I loved playing guitar and singing my favorite songs with and for friends.
My bass playing began in earnest when Gary Manley, Elmer Perry, Tom Barrett and I formed the band Haywire in 1977. When Haywire broke up after three years, Gary Manley and I put together a new band, The Desires, which lasted only a year or so. After that my musical dreams seemed to die, at least temporarily. They were too wrapped up in a communal dream and I didn’t have the self confidence or drive to pursue finding another band. For 15 years I only played guitar sporadically and bass not at all. I spent this time working as a machinist then later as a model shop manager, helping to raise two kids, and learning how to use computers, which came in handy in both my professional life and my musical life.
In 1997 I joined the band Along For The Ride as the bassist and a vocalist. That ride lasted 17 years and included long stretches of intense songwriting activity.
Backtracking to 2005, I began attending songwriting camps, songwriting workshops and music camps. 2005 - 2013 saw me in one of my most prolific songwriting phases, as well as my involvement as a bassist in the aforementioned Along For The Ride, the jazz band Herd Of Cats, singer/songwriter Steve Meckfessel's live performances, and as a guitarist in my own singer/songwriter activities. When my wife and I moved from the San Francisco Peninsula to Sonoma County in 2013, after 26 years in our Redwood City home, I paused this intense period of songwriting and this pause lasted longer than I expected. I just couldn't get untracked again for the next seven years.
I joined the band Jay Field and Friends in 2015, which has now morphed into the band NOTED. At long last songwriting began beckoning to me again, and I began a new project in 2020. That project became the playlist You Take Me Home which is up on Soundcloud. I continue to write and record new material and will continue to feature new recordings on the Featured page, on the Song List pages, on Soundcloud and ultimately on other streaming sites.
Songwriting
For a decade prior to starting up Haywire I had been playing guitar casually, playing and singing songs that I liked, admiring the songwriting of artists like Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins, Jerry Garcia & Robert Hunter, Lennon & McCartney, and many, many others. I hadn’t given much thought, if any, to writing my own songs. Then we started up Haywire. We were doing some covers but also a lot of Gary Manley’s originals, and the mystery I’d always felt about how songs originated began to dissipate. After all, here I was hanging out with a good songwriter three nights a week. Something was bound to rub off. Around the same time I remember driving home from work listening to the radio, station hopping because I didn’t like what I was hearing, and I suddenly thought, “I could do better than that! I should try it.” I don’t know if I was right but I found myself no longer thinking that there was some sort of barrier to creating songs.
My first attempt came about when my wife at the time went home to Oregon for a two week stay with her large extended family. I remember thinking that I was going to have a lot of fun, maybe go out drinking, maybe… whatever… just two weeks of nothing but fun, with few responsibilities, since the kids were with my wife. But it only took a couple of days for that to turn around. I mostly became lonely. I missed my family terribly and the feelings were so strong that they easily fueled the creation of my first song, which at the time I called, “Gotta Have Someone”. Many years later, in 1995 to be exact, I rewrote some of the lyrics because I no longer had the original lyric sheet and couldn’t remember the final verse, and I also changed the name to “I Wanted You To Go”. Fast forward to late 2023 when I decided to get some very old Haywire tapes digitized and I heard a Haywire version of the song which had the original lyrics, obviously, and there was the final verse I’d forgotten, and I liked it so much I had to put it back in. It’s now the third verse of four, the fourth being the final verse I’d rewritten, which I also like and didn’t want to take out.
In the Haywire years that ensued I wrote a number of songs, some of which made it into Haywire’s repertoire and some of which persist to this day. “Thunder and the Rain”, “Runnin’”, and “Love Is What We Need” are part of the NOTED repertoire and they were part of the Along For The Ride repertoire.”Runnin" was incomplete during the Haywire days, but we played “Gotta Have Someone”, “Heart of a Woman”, “Love Is What We Need”, “Music’s In My Soul”, and “Thunder and the Rain”. “I Gotta Know” made it into The Desires repertoire.
In 1995 I bought a Roland MIDI keyboard and began to produce songs in a makeshift home studio. I used the Roland to generate the sounds, Band-in-a-Box to generate backing tracks and Studio Vision Pro to sequence them, and when I had all the instrumental tracks where I wanted them I’d bounce them to stereo onto a Fostex 4 track cassette recorder and add vocals where needed. As the years rolled on those tools were replaced by apps like GarageBand and I was able to keep everything in the digital domain and not have to bounce tracks.
In 2009 I lost a job I’d held for 28 years at a leading laser company and this began my slow transition into eventual retirement from the workday rat race, which I addressed in the song, “I Don’t Need A Reason”, which was part of a CD I produced in 2010 on which I played most of the instruments myself using GarageBand to record the tracks. Eventually I left GarageBand behind and now work exclusively in Logic Pro and Band-in-a-Box.
You can get a sense of my songwriting timeline on the Chronological song list page.
Thanks for your interest.
Paul Fifield