A decade is a long time. It’s funny how quickly it seems to have passed in retro when some moments lasted so very long while living them. I bought a guitar my sophomore year of college after seeing a Melissa Etheridge concert. It was the first time I’d ever seen a woman play guitar and rock out, and something just clicked inside me. I had been struggling through youth like most of us do, but at that concert I found the thing that would help see me through. Of course the only trick was I had to learn how to play and sing first, but luckily youth pays no heed to such obstacles. I will always be grateful to Stephanie Staes for making me the cassette tape of “Never Enough” that turned me on to Melissa Etheridge, and Brian Perry, Angela Herbert and Denise Decristoforo for inviting me to the show at the Orpheum that changed my life.

After college, I kicked around for awhile teaching myself to play, writing songs and pounding them out on an acoustic guitar before I discovered punk rock music. It fit perfectly with my do-it-yourself ethos and penchant for wailing out a song. I asked (Theodore) Lee Kennedy and Becky Shaw to back me up after seeing the two of them play an impromptu jam at a friend’s house. Becky expressed some concern, since she hadn’t actually played drums outside of that jam, but I told her I was sure it would work out fine, and truly it did. Rob Gal engineered the first STB single, turned my amp up to eleven, and we were off and running. We recorded two albums, “Spit” (2000) and “Swerve” (2002), and played some of the most fun and memorable (for reasons both sublime and absurd) shows you could imagine, culminating in a gig opening for Patti Smith where we ended up on stage with the band singing, “People Have The Power.”

Lee Kennedy played bass and Becky Shaw played drums and sang harmony on the songs performed by STB. Rob Gal played the guitar solo on “Beggar, Queen & Thief.”

Have you ever noticed how things seem to work out just as you need them to and not at all how you would have wanted at the time? Around the time that STB was slowing down, my mother flew home from Los Angeles to New Orleans. She started talking to the woman next to her, as she is wont to do, and talking up her musician daughter, as she is also wont to do. It turned out that the woman was also from New Orleans, and had just been in L.A. setting up a showcase for her brother’s band. The next thing you know I found myself on the phone with Michele Gaudin, and she found herself in Atlanta at what turned out to be STB’s last show. She expressed interest in managing the band, but we were headed in different directions. Lee got a gig as Michelle Malone’s bass player and went off to tour the country, and Becky was starting a family. We parted ways as friends, and I headed

home to New Orleans to start over with a new manager.

Michele encouraged me to get into the studio to record a demo that we could shop around. While I worked on writing the songs, she reached out to her friend, Eddie Ecker, about playing drums with me. After listening to some of the STB tracks, Eddie signed on and reached out to his friend, Steve Walters, about playing some bass. Pretty soon, we were in the studio recording four tracks with Mike Mayeaux engineering and Tim Sommers producing.

Eddie Ecker played drums and Steve Walters played bass on “Suckerpunch” and “Open.”

The band was short-lived, but I will always be grateful to Michele for bringing me home to play music, showing me how to put my best foot forward and, most of all, believing in me. We did have a great time playing while it lasted, though, and along the way I forged some friendships that I cherish to this day, including with Eddie and Steve. I first met Mary Lasseigne and Ruby Rendrag when we played a show at the Howlin’ Wolf with their band Dingo 8. I also met Paul Sanchez for the first time when Eddie Ecker introduced us and invited him to join us on stage at the Hurricane Fest to sing harmonies on “Open.”

But by the summer of 2003, I was broke and back in Atlanta full-time feeling like a pretty big failure after having two bands fall apart in less than a year. Thanks to the kindness of Beth Martin, Jane Wood and Stacey Eames, who were opening a new shop called Cold Cream, I got a job scooping ice cream and serving coffee. Business was pretty slow during large stretches of the day, so I brought my travel guitar to work and spent the down times practicing and writing songs. Around this time, Rob Gal encouraged me to buy a newfangled thing called an Mbox. With everything else I’d been putting on my credit cards, I figured, why not? The Mbox is a two channel interface that allows you to record straight into your computer, but for me it was a game changer; the key to my own “studio” and a whole new world.

During one of my first forays into recording, I laid down fourteen songs in a marathon session one day, just sitting in my room playing while one mic captured the sound. Even as I was starting to explore layered tracking and experimenting with different instruments, I wanted to capture something simple and true. At that moment of feeling keenly all my failings, I also felt the need to strip everything away to its essence and reflect. I called the recording “Songs in Solitude” and kept it mostly to myself.

Meanwhile, I kept scooping ice cream and developing a nice espresso habit. I decided that since I’d failed at music, perhaps I could become a writer. I’d always written, but I tried to become more disciplined every day and actually finish stories I started. I even went so far as to take the GRE and apply to a creative writing program. During the shift at Cold Cream when I found out the program had rejected my application, I truly hit bottom. I closed up the shop and hid in the back room feeling like the biggest loser in the world and wondering what the hell I was going to do.

In retro, I don’t really know how long I let myself feel immobilized by sadness. I don’t think depression is something that comes on you one day and leaves the next. But I do know that at the point I felt the lowest and most incapable of getting by, I turned once again to music to see me through. I spent hours with the Mbox, before and after work, recording and writing simultaneously, using whatever instruments I had at my disposal. Beth and Jane moved to Tybee Island and left me 2 toms, a kick and a crash, so I used that on a song I was working on at the time called, “Summertime.” A little while later Rob lent me a snare, so I started incorporating that into the recordings. I played around with lots of layers of guitar, tried a bit of harmonica, laid down the bass, added shakers and tambourines, eventually bought a hi-hat, tried songs on piano instead of guitar, tried playing things forward, then tried playing them backwards, whatever felt inspired and creative at the time. It was a revelation to make music in my own way and time without care for studio costs or concern for what anyone else might think. I called the collection of songs, “mouth to mouth,” because its creation truly breathed new life into me.

Around the time I finished “mouth to mouth,” I got a job at Earthshaking Music as a salesperson and spent most of my time trying to learn as much as I could about tube amplification, soundboards and all the different instruments from around the world that we sold. I will always be grateful to Dave Strohauer for hiring me that day when I walked in off the street and offered to help because he seemed a little short-handed. Earthshaking is full of curious, creative, intelligent and engaging people, like Eric Belt, luthier extraordinaire who also designs and builds his own high end guitar amps, and Scott Trinh, who I watched turn himself first into a web coder and then into an excellent recording engineer. It was here, surrounded by music and musicians, that I had the conscious realization that I didn’t have to front my own band; that I would by very happy just playing in someone else’s.

Remember before when I mentioned how things seem to work out as you need them to even when they don’t seem to be going according to plan at the time? It wasn’t too long after my light bulb moment that my friend Mary Lasseigne gave me a call and said she was coming

through town. In the two years since I’d last played with Dingo 8, Mary had auditioned for and gotten hired as the bass player for the New Orleans rock band, Cowboy Mouth. She had been crisscrossing the country on a tour bus, playing shows and living the dream. When Mary came through town with CM, she came by Earthshaking and we went and had lunch. As an aside, she asked me if I’d ever thought about playing bass. I told her I’d been playing it in the studio and loved it, though I’d never played live with anyone.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Mary was looking for a replacement. Her parents had been ill, and she wanted to get off the road to spend time with her family. Less than a month after we spoke, I found myself on stage in Biloxi with Paul Sanchez and the rest of the band, subbing for her at a show that would become an audition and the beginning of my next three years on the road as a bass player and my on-going journey as a sideman.

For the first time in my life I was making a living as a full-time musician. I tried to make the most of the time, practicing bass and writing songs on the back of the bus during long drives. I picked up a mandolin along the way because it was small and added a different texture when everyone else was jamming on guitar. When I was home I would book time with DeDe Vogt at Sound and Fury Studios to lay down tracks on a new solo album, song by song as I wrote them. After all of the work I’d put into “mouth to mouth,” I wanted to just play and let someone else engineer. I specifically wanted to work with DeDe both because she was a friend I’d known since I was twenty and because she recorded to tape instead of to a computer. After playing rock ‘n roll every night, I seemed to be writing songs with softer edges and wanted to lay down the music without any punches or edits, just letting it be and breathe in the warmth of analog. If you can imagine songs as paintings, I always thought of these as water colors. I called the album, “from a seed of sand.”

I played everything (for better or for worse) on “Songs in Solitude,” “mouth to mouth,” and “from a seed of sand.”

Of course, the majority of my time was spent touring with Cowboy Mouth. We played an average of five nights a week and stayed on the road as much as possible. When I first joined the band, they were also in the midst of recording the album that would become, “VooDoo Shoppe.” Mary had begun the journey with them, playing bass and co-writing songs, and I jumped in to do the same and see it through. But while we were in Atlanta recording a couple of tracks with Russ T. Cobb, Hurricane Katrina swept over New Orleans, the levees broke, and everything changed.

After Katrina, we transformed from a rock band into ambassadors for our city. We finished “VooDoo Shoppe” with songs “Home” and “the Avenue” that pined for New Orleans. Our sponsor, Southern Comfort, gave us boxes of clothes to distribute as we traveled the country. Strangers and friends who had been displaced to cities foreign to them flocked to shows to get a taste of home. We sang for survival, we played with passion, we tried to bring hope even as we sometimes wept. Paul and his wife, Shelly, had lost everything that they did not have with them on the bus, literally. Every city we went to they considered moving to, because, why not? I had lost nothing, but they had been with me through an agonizing five days when my parents and younger sister were trapped in the flooded city. The tragedy pulled the band together in some ways but created great chasms in others. There was sadness and drink and anger and drink and more than anything a coming to terms with life and love and the things that really matter.

Shelly and Paul left the band at the end of 2006, and I followed in 2007. I had played shows beyond my wildest dreams with Cowboy Mouth, but I had also realized along the way that time was short, I had a long way to go on my journey as a musician, and it was time for me to move on. I will always be grateful for that time and the opportunity; to Paul, Griff, Fred, Shelly, Eddie, Hitchie, Stewie and the rest of the cast of characters that paraded with us. They taught me what it means to be a working band, how to put on a show and give it your all every moment, how to live on a bus, stash your own jar of peanut butter, laugh til you cry, start a breakfast club, play bocci ball and roll baby roll. I will also always be grateful to Shelly in particular for teaching me how to stop being so serious, embrace the moments that come your way, dive in and have some fun.

I have a habit of leaving something when I know it’s right even though I have no idea what I’m going to do next. I had no plan and no job, but I just knew that it was time for me to do some growing as a musician and start another band of my own. After returning from Belize, Paul was ready to hit the road and invited me and Eddie Ecker along for the first tour. He christened the band, “The Rolling Road Show,” and envisioned a collective that celebrated different songwriters and made great music while always having fun. Eddie was on drums and I was on guitar and mandolin, flying by the seat of my pants and trying to grow as quickly as possible. The next thing I knew, I was in a studio recording on Paul’s album, “Exit to Mystery Street,” with Matt Perrine, John Boutte, Ivan Neville, Shamarr Allen, Craig Klein and Big Sam among other incredible musicians, realizing just how much I had to learn.

While in Atlanta, I had reached out to my former bandmate, Lee Kennedy, and my old friend, Linda Bolley, to see if they were interested in starting a band. Linda and Lee had

been on the road with Michelle Malone while I’d been touring with Cowboy Mouth, and we were all interested in playing some music with friends without any band angst or drama. We called ourselves, “Herman Put Down The Gun.” After playing a show at the Hi Ho Lounge in New Orleans, the folks at Spun TV put us in the studio for a weekend to record some songs. We played everything live and overdubbed the vocals and ended up with an album. I think we thought Spun was going to release it and maybe they thought we were going to release it. I’m not sure what happened, so not much happened, and we burned some copies for friends and gas money.

Lee Kennedy played bass and Linda Bolley played drums and sang harmony on the songs performed by Herman Put Down The Gun.

While I was out playing some shows with Paul and the Rolling Road Show again, I got a call from my partner, who was at a party listening to some friends jam, encouraging me to get a banjo so I could join in some time. Paul thought banjo would be a nice addition too, so from the back of the mini-van heading up the east coast, I called my friend DeDe Vogt, who now owned a music shop, and asked her to pick me out a nice banjo. Those friends turned out to be Linda Bolley, this time on guitar, Beth Wheeler and Lenny Lasater. I joined in on banjo and Becky Shaw picked up the lap steel, button accordion and harp and we became the alterna-grass group known as Roxie Watson.

Beth Wheeler played mandolin, Lenny Lasater played bass and sang harmony, Linda Bolley played guitar and sang harmony and Becky Shaw played harmonica and sang harmony on “Oh Magnolia.”

So now it’s 2011 and the year is fast drawing to a close. Paul Sanchez and The Rolling Road Show has grown and expanded and just released its first album, “Reclamation of the Pie-Eyed Piper,” Roxie Watson is in the midst of mixing its second album that will be released in early 2012, I am past overdue laying down guitar and vocal tracks for an EP Herman Put Down The Gun started recording, and I am still writing songs, making home demos, planning my next solo album and trying to grow as a musician. Each new endeavor brings new opportunity for learning, and I feel more than blessed for the people I call friends with whom I have been honored to make music. I have a long way to go yet am so grateful for the journey that has led me thus far. The songs included in this collection are a blink-of-the-eye glimpse of that path. They were originally released independently or not at all, so I thought now, in retro, I might share them with you. Thanks be. Sonia~