In the Spring of 2008, my great friend Doug Marsh called me and invited me to be the substitute lead guitar player in his band Catch a Dream, since the regular guitar player, Alan Stewart, occasionally had to miss some gigs due to other commitments. I ended up playing one gig with the band. Actually it was only half a gig, because Alan showed up in time for the second set. But it was that call from Doug that got me started playing again and what led to me writing the songs that ended up on "Where the Truth Lies."

During the time I had been rehearsing with Doug's band, he and I sometimes met with our mutual friend Steve Voorhies. We would pick on some tunes of theirs and see what different types of instrumentation to use. At one point, we decided we wanted to write a song together. Steve had a melody, and Doug was going to take a stab at the lyrics. It's been over a year now, and all three of us have tried to write lyrics for the tune, but nothing has come of it so far. But that was the inspiration for me wanting to start writing my own songs.

Doug got too busy and had to drop out, but Steve and I committed to working together every Thursday night to try to pull some songs together. Steve's brother Bob also committed to working with us Thursdays.

We would work on new material every week, each of us bringing in a piece of this and a tidbit of that. We would work on all the pieces when we were together, but mostly we wrote alone during the week. We didn't really write songs together as much as we helped each other craft the songs we wrote on our own.

As we were working on the songs, we recorded them on my computer using the Cubase digital audio workstation (DAW). My brother-in-law Kurt Sonntag had let me borrow his Yamaha piano synthesizer, which had a bunch of different drum beats in it that we used for our rhythm tracks.

As we worked out the songs using the computer recording software, we found we were able to be really critical of the songs, which allowed us to talk about them and tweak them until they finally satisfied our ears.

Working with Bob and Steve has been great. Without their support and creative input, I don't think I could ever have gotten the "Where the Truth Lies" recording project off the ground. They really helped me get the songs good enough to record.