Music:
Member Since: 12/07/2007
Band Members: The tunes on My Back Yard have a "play me again" quality. It comes from Don Jones' fluid and lilting touch on the guitar - to be sure - but more from the engaging melodies he writes, and the consistantly pleasing tone colors he coaxes from both steel-sting and nylon-string guitars. His tunes have the distinction of sounding fresh and new, but also give the feeling that they've been with you for a long time. Good songwriters always seek to create something called a hook. If the song you write doesn't have one or more hooks, it will soon be banished to the dusty attic of time. Why? Simply, the hook is that part of the tune that causes the listener to remember it. It can be found in lyrics (tie a yellow ribbon..." comes to mind for some reason), but most often it comes in the form of melody, as these tunes am;y demonstrate. Many of the player/composers who have made solo guitar records in recent times create their compositions using "patterns" of notes, probably because flashy note-patterns are easily discovered on the guitar. But Don is one of the few who realize that it's a good melody and solid song structure - well rendered - which give a tune its life, and that mere note-patterns and "licks" are soon forgotton by the listener. And to make extra sure that he won't be on the same path as nearly every other guitar player on earth, Don plays the guitar upside down! He says that everyone in his family learned to play the guitar backwards like that, and it's not a case of being left handed. Among the hurdles imposed by this idea is a major one - almost all the guitar books and lessons out there are nearly useless to a person who plays the guitar reversed like that. But instead of being hindered by this strange geometry, Don's style has been - surprisingly - nurtured by it. He's had to figure out unique fingerings for every chord he knows, and has found new playing approaches that would not be apparent to a "normal" guitar player. Rather than holding him back, these challenges have made his guitar style quite unique. -Pat Kirtley, January 1998
Record Label: Unsigned