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Hi guys! I want to schedule a Sleeve Livestream session soon, and thought I'd reach out and get some feedback first. I particularly want to take questions, have discussions and interact with you as much as possible, so is there a better day of the week or time of day? What topics should we focus on? Are you interested in regular once a month recurring sessions?

Please let me know your thoughts here on Sleeve and we'll get things going.

Also, sorry about the Sleeve silence recently – I'll do my best to be on here more often going forward.

Best and thanks!

Eddie

Lately I’ve been thinking and discussing with other songwriters and composers a lot about AI and the implications for musicians and creative people. There's certainly a lot of chatter about what AI can do, but not so much about what it might undo, how it might already be "un-teaching" us in profound ways.

When I started learning guitar, figuring out how to play a new chord was a challenge. It took time. My fingers had to stretch and fumble their way into place. But that effort wasn’t wasted — it was a lesson first, and then a marvelous discovery when I began to understand what I could do with that chord in relation to the other chords I was learning. So it was a physical challenge first, and then through frustration and repetition, it literally became an important part of what I do, who I was, and thankfully, who still I am.

I used to be great with directions, had an innate sense of where things were and could follow my nose and find my way. Now usually – and often against my own instincts – I follow Google Maps on my phone. It just seems easier and takes away any uncertainty. But I sense it’s costing me something, and that is my own ability to figure out where I'm going. I am weakening a part of myself, and eventually may loose it altogether.

I’m not anti-AI. I think these tools can be incredible. But I also think there’s something irreplaceable about challenging ourselves. About following our own instincts and working through something that's hard. About wrestling with our own limitations, making mistakes and then the sense of growth and satisfaction when we find our way, whether it's creatively, or to a friend's house in a part of town we have never been in before.

If we outsource all of that — all the reaching and stretching, fumbling and learning – are the machines our tools, or is it the other way round? Whose creative life is it if each of us is not finding our own way, but the destination is being handed to us on a silicon platter?

I'll leave it there and would love to hear your thoughts.

There’s a lot to say about the 1980’s and music. It was still what I would call the golden age of popular music, starting with Beatles in the mid 1960’s – and would continue into the early years of the 1990’s – finally killed by music streaming both legal and otherwise. 

Hard to believe now, but in those halcyon days one could actually make a living just writing songs. Imagine that. 

Not saying it was easy, I worked at it day and night, and I was driven by love and compulsion (two very powerful forces that still play a role in my life today), not to mention inspiration by the incredible music that was being written and recorded by a pantheon of talent in those amazing years. 

Into this “Gifted Age”, and only for a brief moment, came the musical group L.E.D. aka Lenny, Eddie and Dave.

Lenny Zakatek, had attained fame as the lead singer in The Alan Parson’s Project (“Eye in the Sky”, “Games People Play”) and his Canadian manager approached me and my then musical partner, Dave Tyson to write and produce a project for Lennie.  Over the course of a few weeks L.E.D. was born. And, no – there’s no reason you should have ever heard about it, since none of the recordings we did were ever released publicly. 

One of those demo recordings was a song called “Don’t Shed a Tear”, later recorded by one of my lifelong musical heroes, Paul Carrack.

Another was “Room With a View”, fortunately later recorded by another tremendous artist, Jeffery Osborne.

I recently came across the L.E.D. "demos" of these two songs, the ones Paul and Jeffrey would have heard when they were screening songs for their own albums. I'll be sharing those original L.E.D. recording, among others shortly

Thanks for reading and to be continued . . .