Season's Greetings! Love Come Around!

Time has a way of changing the perspectives and predilections we all have about different things.

It's been 2 years since I saw my friends and my family. This Christmas I'll be going to see them! At first that's all this was gonna be... A Christmas song about me being glad to go home for the holidays. I live in LA but grew up in Seattle. I still call it home even though I've been in the city of angels about as long as I've been anywhere else.

I wanna talk a little bit about the journey of this song and how it came to be what it has become. When I originally got in the studio with drummer Alan White and bassist Bernt Bodal, this song was a tear-jerker love ballad with a completely different story. That's the way they first heard "Come Around" back some years ago when I performed it live in a room full of famous people all there to watch me play at like 4am? What??? yeah.. it's true. Long story. Crazy right? Crazier still to me was that we became friends and I got to record and perform with some of them. Thus I have the great Alan White from the band YES and John Lennon!!! playing drums on this song. Talk about Gratitude!! I have Matt Fink of Prince and the Revolution to thank for introducing me to Bubba Jones who provided Critical Sun Recording studio, in Seattle WA where we tracked the song. I have Steve Feasely to thank for engineering the session and providing me the masters so I could take them back to LA to finish the work. I don't know how it happened but when we 3 got in the studio in Seattle and started jamming on it a ballad turned into a super up beat reggae vibe tune and thus the groove of the tune as you now will hear as "Love Come Around" was born... but the lyrics didn't fit anymore.
As I said..time has a way of changing all things... really that's all i needed to say. "Time has a way of changing all things." Love Come Around

Fast-forward to only a week ago in my studio:
While writing and recording new lyrics to fit the state of now, the state of me and the state of we the people of a world gone haywire, I found myself feeling silly for lamenting the events that hadn't gone as planned in my life. Finding the short-comings in your design is easy to do when you talk with and make music with millionaires and rock legends and compare their status and accolades to your own. I am not a legend or a millionaire.

Anyways like I said... as I wrote, my thoughts shifted to another place. A real place with no glamour, no shiny exterior, no social agenda. A true place of compassion and if I'm being honest... despair.
A few blocks from my apartment in Los Angeles there are those who don't know where their next meal is coming from... or if they will live to see another day... or if their home will be taken from them without warning.... This is a song about love, generosity, kindness and gratitude. It made me feel good to make it. I hope it makes you feel good to listen to it. I also hope it will encourage you to help those who need it. There are so many.
Remember that things can always be better and that they can also always be worse. Finding the balance with that realization and showing up either way is helpful for surviving and thriving.
Love come around. -PH