Sometimes you just have to get down with some Southern, gospel-inspired blues. The blues that flowed out of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s influenced all Southern sounds that followed. If you grew up Southern, you grew up with the more »
Category: Demos
demos of new songs by Thomas Oliver
Trying to Keep the Record Straight
(a video)
Inside a Hurricane (a demo)
For Hurricane Matthew, we evacuated Tybee Island and were not allowed back on the island for several days. However, as Irma veered east, evacuation wasn’t mandatory, and though it brought worse flooding, we were there in the house as two more »
There were signs (a demo)
Signs is what is called a “list” song. In this case, lists of all the ideas people have of this mysterious stranger, who is never identified. Better left to the listener’s imagination. more »
Love in the Time of War (a demo)
Here’s how the song “Love in the Time of War” came to be: Several years back, Melissa and I scoured Pennsylvania’s courthouses and graveyards looking for her ancestors. We visited the Pond Eddy Bridge, a two-span, one-lane steel structure more »
Trying to Keep the Record Straight
(a demo)
I love to write story songs. Seeing as mine are totally fiction, I get to imagine things outside my life: like murder and gambling and philanders and mesdames. (See Getaway Smile). Here’s the latest, about a man lured into a night that changed more »