Tom Ciurczak

I got it in my mind to write and record a Christmas song in 2021.  A friend of mine, Doug Suman, had recently written one, and it convinced me that I should have one in my song repertoire as well.  However, I wanted to stay away from the more traditional types of Christmas Songs, so I came up with a bit of a satirical idea on the commercialization of Christmas in the Movies. 

With my day job I had spent a lot of time on the Paramount Studio back-lots, so it was easy to come up with the imagery of filming a snowy Christmas night time scene during a bright sunny day in Southern California.

I decided to poke a little fun at how the “Hollywood Production Factory” uses famous movie personalities to pitch the “must have” products in films, that everyone needs to buy for the holidays. I decided to write it as an up-tempo rock song. (I just didn’t think the world needed another Silent Night).

Brett and Stephen came up with the idea to add Christmas Carolers to the song intro, and this really set the song up perfectly as we wanted to give it a cheesy TV commercial sound throughout.

I usually like to have a subplot with my songs, and I do think Christmas songs should have something positive to say, so I was able to weave a bit of a love song into it as well. Finally,

I would be remiss if I didn’t come up with a really cool guitar part. To me writing songs is all about creating “ear candy” both musically and lyrically for the listener. I was able to come up with a very catchy guitar outro, which I really love and I think fit perfectly. 

For this son Sarven Manguiat was on electric guitar; I played acoustic guitar; Travis Carlton was on bass; Bonnie Brooksbank was on Piano and Stephen Haaker was on drums. Harrison Crenshaw sang all the background vocals and Harmonies. 

My Christmas Caroler's were: Diana Ortiz, Jayme Palmer, and Bonnie Brooksbank. 

Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker Engineered and Produced it. We recorded it at “Perfect Sound Studio’s” in Frogtown CA and “The Vanguard” in North Hollywood.. The song was mastered by Jennifer Munson at Taloowa Corp.

I believe one of the key elements in writing good lyrics is to have a good metaphor. I’ve heard this said by many great song writers. So, when I heard the phrase “I’m going to leave it to the Universe” I knew it would be perfect theme to write a song around. 

It’s a song about life on the run, escape and ultimately it's a love story. 

Musically it borrows a lot from both the Who and Bruce Springsteen. I love the contrast between the use of “Power Chords” and “Acoustic Guitar flat picking”, something that both Pete Townshend and Springsteen are really both great at. 

Springsteen often likes to change keys whenever he would have Clarence Clemons do a sax solo, so I used this idea for the outro and Fabian Chavez on Sax just killed it! 

We recorded this song at the same time we recorded “Christmas Time in Hollywood” and then released it as a single early in 2022.  It did quite well on European Radio and on Spotify. 

Sarven Manguiat did another fantastic job on electric guitar. I again played acoustic guitar, Travis Carlton was on bass, Aaron Durr played piano, Stephen Haaker was on drums and Fabian Chavez played Sax. The amazing Harrison Crenshaw sang all the background vocals and harmonies.

 Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker Engineered and Produced it. We recorded it at “Perfect Sound Studio’s” in Frogtown CA and “The Vanguard” in North Hollywood. The song was mastered by Jennifer Munson at Taloowa Corp.

I was purposely trying to come up with a rhyming scheme similar to Bruce Springsteen’s “Blinded by the Light.” It did wind up being significantly different though, as I ended up with a different rhyming pattern.

Guitar wise, I used a similar major and suspended chord picking style that Springsteen likes to often use. Which  when put together with the lyric pattern gave this song a very strong semblance to a 1970’s style Bruce Springsteen song. 

I chose a bit of a dark subject matter and then applied my sense of humor to the lyrics to soften it up. The song is about a stalker that winds up stalking the wrong woman. I always imagined “Pepe Le Pew” as my model for the stalker in this song. Pepe just could never understand Penelope Cat and why she wasn’t interested in him. So just like Pepe, my character felt that no matter what the problem was he could find a way to work it out. Nothing was a deal breaker in his mind. 

The song takes an absurd turn in the third verse as I reveal that the woman he’s been following turns out to be a bank robber. He winds up interrupting her during the middle of a robbery. But just like Pepe it was not going to stop him on getting together with this girl. 

I played all the guitar parts for this song; Stephen Haaker was on Drums, Rob Hall on Bass and Aaron Durr was on the B3 organ. Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz were on backing and harmony vocals. 

Engineering and Production was done by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. This song was recorded at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. It was Mastered at the Lodge in NYC by Emily Lazar.

I realized I had a lot of Character driven songs, but I didn’t have any love songs.  So, I sat down to specifically write a couple for the album.  Just before deciding on the songs for the album, I wrote and handed in three songs: “Roll the Dice”, “Strung Out” and “Top of the World” and they all made the final CD.  

“Roll The Dice” was written around a string of gambling metaphors about taking chances on love. I had written the chorus first, which is unusual for me, as I normally start with the verse.  But I wanted to concentrate on coming up with a catchy chorus to grab the listeners ear. 

I had been listening to Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream”, and I really loved Mike Campbell's guitar part on it.  This influenced what I tried to do with the guitar riff I used with the verse. We overlaid a sax and later slide guitar along with it and the end result wound up being something completely different sounding from where I started.

This wound up being the first single we released. I never envisioned it would be a a single, yet it has done quite well with over 100,000 Spotify streams.

For this song Sarven Manguiat played all the slide and lead guitar work, while I played all the rhythm guitars,  Rob Hall played bass; Stephen Haaker was on Drums and Aaron Durr was on all Keyboards. Fabian Chavez, as he did throughout the entire album, just absolutely killed it on Saxophone. Harrison Crenshaw and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz, are on backing vocals and harmonies. 

The song was engineered and produced by Stephen Haaker and Brett Grossman. We recorded it at “Perfect Sound Studios” in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles.  Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NYC Mastered this song.

I always liked Westerns and decided to write a song with a Western theme.  I was watching “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” at the time I was writing the lyrics and I kept thinking about it as I developed the song's story line.

There are lots of fun guitar parts and rhythms throughout this song.

I have always been a big fan of twin guitar harmony style of: “Allman Brothers”, “Wishbone Ash”, “Thin Lizzy” etc., so I came up with a cool guitar riff and harmony, as an homage to them.  I then laid this over an acoustic guitar part that I flat picked for the intro and verse, and it wound up meshing quite well. For the chorus and bridge, I changed it up and used some power chords reminiscent of the Ramones. 

Great guitar solo work on this song by Sarven Manguiat once again, that really made this song standout! 

I played all the electric and acoustic rhythm guitars, while Sarven Manguiat handled all the lead work.  Rob Hall was on bass; Stephen Haaker was on Drums and Aaron Durr was on all Keyboards. Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz are all on backing vocals.  

"The Last Gunfighter" was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded it at Perfect Sound Studios in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager in Los Angeles.. The song was Mastered by Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NYC.

"Mine Torne Road” is a long winding road just north of the Bear Mountain Bridge that connects Rte. 9W, in Fort Montgomery, NY, to the West Point reservation on Rte. 293. I used it along with many other local places from the Highland Falls/Fort Montgomery area as a backdrop setting for a story about what I like to refer to as a  “Triple Cross” 

The song is about a planned double cross that happened during an illicit substance purchase. However, even though everyone had rehearsed their part, something goes wrong and the plan goes sideways. Chaos ensues, gunfire is exchanged, and a fire breaks out burning Dickies to the ground. The narrator assumes everyone and everything is lost in the fire. Twenty years later he’s still suffering from PTSD and is now living down in New York City.  One day, while at JFK airport, he thinks he sees his old girlfriend there, so he follows her back to her apartment to discover all this time she was still alive and had set him up. 

This is another song that has a strong Bruce Springsteen influence to it. We open the song with a beautiful piano intro by Aaron Durr.  I wanted to create something like Springsteen's intro to “New York City Serenade” or “Backstreets”.  I believe we executed on it perfectly. The song's rhythms as well as the rhyming patterns of the lyrics are also pure 1970’s Springsteen. It's my favorite song on the album.

On this song I played rhythm guitar while Sarven Manguiat again handled all the lead guitar work. Rob Hall was on bass; Stephen Haaker was on Drums; Aaron Durr was on Keyboards. Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz are on backing vocals.  The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded it at Perfect Sound Studios in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. The song was mastered by Emily Lazar at the Lodge in NY.

As I said previously, I realized I didn’t have any love songs for the “Call Me Ishmael” album. So, just before we decided on the songs we would use for the album, I sat down to focus on writing a couple of love songs specifically for it. 

I liked the "Love is the Drug” metaphor that “Strung Out” conveys and concentrated on writing the song around it.  This song came together relatively quickly. I used a lot of major seventh chords throughout, to give the song a smooth jazz feel to it. Then I recruited my daughter, Kelly, to sing the female lead and harmonies with me. 

I had written the instrumental melody for guitar, but then we came up with the idea of replacing the guitar with a muted trumpet. Then to make it truly unique we added a back and forth exchange of the trumpet with a violin. This really helped the song take on the feel of a smokey jazz lounge we were looking for.

I played all the guitar parts, Rob Hall was on bass, Fabian Chavez was on conga’s and Stephen Haaker was on drums and Aaron Durr was on piano. John Manness and Bonnie Brooksbank made amazing contributions on Trumpet and Violin respectively. My daughter Kelly Ciurczak shared lead vocals with me and sang all the harmonies. The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded everything at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. The song was Mastered by Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NY.

I started writing a collection of themed songs for a Rock Opera back in high school.  We were studying “Jesus Christ Superstar” in High School at the time. “Tommy” by the Who and “Thick as a Brick” by Jethro Tull had also recently come out and I was thoroughly fascinated by the idea of the concept / rock opera album. I studied and dissected them all, to try to understand them better.

At the same time, I was also a huge fan of Marvel Comics, especially the “Fantastic Four” and their adventures in the “Negative Zone”, “the Watchers” and “Gallacticus”.  I decided I would have some fun and write my own Rock Opera by meshing together all of these ideas together. The basic theme of my project was that “God was an Alien”. I wound up writing 35 songs for this project. A number of them I thought were pretty good, but the whole narrative needed way too much pruning and re-writes to make anything out of it, so I put it on the shelf. 

“Do you know my Name” is one of the songs I rescued from this project and cleaned up so it could be a stand-alone piece.  Pete Townshend had done something similar with his “Lifehouse” project.  He never officially released it, but many of his best songs showed up on “Who’s Next”.  

For my album, I felt I needed a different type of  song and really had always like this one.  It focuses on the anti-hero/hero. I had based the character on Lee Marvin’s character “Kid Shelleen" from “Cat Ballou”. 

Because we were studying “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the time, the song winds up having a lot of religious metaphors and visuals throughout.

Like many songs on this CD, this is another rocker.  At the time I was also a big fan of the James Gang and early Joe Walsh guitar songs.  I always try to pay homage to my rock hero’s in my songs and I try to put something in every song to salute them. The song's outro is pure Joe Walsh era style James Gang.  

I played majority of  guitar throughout, Sarven Manguiat joined in during the outro. Rob Hall was on bass, Stephen Haaker was on drums and Fabian Chavez was on Sax. Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz were on backing vocals and harmonies. The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded everything at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NYC mastered this song.

I always was intrigued by the homeless situation in Los Angeles. I never experienced anything like it growing up in upstate New York. In Southern California we have tent cities and encampments under highway overpasses. It’s nearly impossible to come off a highway freeway ramp and not have someone at the bottom of it with a sign looking for some spare change, food, or a job. It got me thinking about how someone winds up in such a situation. So, I decided to create a story write a song from that person’s perspective. 

I came up with a backstory about a normal guy whose whole world crashes after his marriage breaks up and he now finds himself being homeless, living on the street, begging for money and raiding trash bins for recyclables. He still has nightmares of his ex-wife haunting him, but dreams of a happy future someday down in Mexico “dancing with the senoritas”.  He is alone, has no friends, and often his dinner is half eaten McDonald's hamburgers and cold french fries. 

Many songwriters like to offset stories of depressed characters with very uplifting music. “Dancing in the Dark” immediately comes to mind as an example.  So I set out to do something similar. I utilized the major and suspended chord structure, which is a Springsteen signature sound and then fused it together with a TexMex Rock vibe, which adding trumpet really brought to life. 

I played all the guitar parts for the song. Rob Hall was on bass and Stephen Haaker drums. John Manness played Trumpet and Fabian Chavez was on Sax.  Harrison Crenshaw sang all the backup and harmony vocals.  Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker engineered and produced the song. We recorded it at Perfect Sound Studios in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. It was mastered at the Lodge in NYC by Emily Lazar.

As I said previously, I realized I didn’t have any love songs for the “Call Me Ishmael” album.  I had songs about stalkers, drug dealers, arsonists, smugglers and the homeless, but no love songs. So, I consciously sat down to write a couple for the album.  So just before we were deciding on the songs for the album, I wrote three songs: “Roll the Dice”, “Strung Out” and “Top of the World” all rather quickly (and all very different) “Top of the World” was the last song I wrote.

I had been working on the chorus and really liked the guitar riff in it, but I couldn’t come up with a verse that I felt worked. I went back and started reviewing some of my older songs for idea’s I could use and found a song I wrote in  the 1980's.   The verses just fit so well with the chorus that I decided to use them together.

I had a real cool guitar part I was working on that fit perfectly as the intro and Walla!!! 

This wound up being more of folk rock song closer in style to a Dan Fogelberg, America etc. than anything else on the album. The title was from the iconic line by James Cagney in "White Heat" and also DiCaprio in Titanic. (though I was thinking Cagney at the time) 

I played all the guitars, Rob Hall was on bass, Ethan Sherman on Mandolin and Stephen Haaker was on drums.  Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz were on backing vocals. The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles.  Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NY did the mastering.

“Sunny Came Back” was inspired by Shawn Colvin's song  “Sunny Came Home.”  She won a Grammy for song and record of the year in 1998 for it.  Her song is about a woman named Sunny who basically burns down a house with her ex-boyfriend inside.  I saw her at a show with Steve Earle promoting an album they made together and Steve would say she specialized in writing "Murder Ballads”.

I thought that it would be interesting to write a similar song from the ex-boyfriend’s point of view. So, I wrote “Sunny Came Back” about a crazy ex-girlfriend who burns down this guy’s house with him inside. 

I tried to write it in a folk rock, “Eagles” style, with lots of different cool guitar riffs that would be fun to play and listen to sprinkled throughout.

Sarven Manguiat played all the lead guitar on this song while I played all the other guitar parts. Rob Hall played bass, Stephen Haaker was on Drums., Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz were on back round vocals and harmonies. Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker  engineered and produced it. The song was recorded at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown, CA and Cosmic Voyager Studio's in Los Angeles. Mastering was done at "the Lodge" in NYC by Emily Lazar.

“Faces in the Crowd”  was the last song we recorded for the Ishmael album. We recorded it live in Perfect Sound Studios and video taped the performance and recording of it. It’s an older song and dates back to the late 1970's.  We wanted a more acoustic song that we could use to inter space between the more up-tempo songs on the album and be a bridge to set up the albums third act. So, I took it out of mothballs and dusted it off and re-wrote the majority of the lyrics for it. 

On the surface, this song is about a guy going back to an old hangout of his, from his past, hoping that he’ll run into old friends there and hopefully an old flame that he still had issues with. However, the song is also about growing older, the choices we’ve made in life, and what we might have done differently. (and if it would have mattered in the end anyways.) 

The song was originally inspired by the Beatles's song “I've Just Seen A Face” but is many times the case when you set to learn a new song, you often make plenty of mistakes and these mistakes can lead you down a path of creating something of your own that's completely different from the original thing that sparked it.  I also made sure I paid homage to another one of my songwriting heroes in this song, Bob Dylan, by referencing that "The answers were still Blowing in the Wind”. 

‘Faces in the Crowd” was recorded at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown CA.  The musicians on this song are: Sarven Manguiat on acoustic guitar; Bonnie Brooksbank on violin; Rob Hall on Upright Bass; and Stephen Haaker on percussion. Brett Grossman and Sean Kellett were the engineers and Stephen Haaker along with Brett Grossman produced the song. This song was recorded at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown CA.  It was Mastered at “the Lodge” in NYC by Emily Lazar. 

The video of “Faces in the Crowd” was shot and edited by Noel Ross.