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Greetings, my name is James Shields and posted here are songs I’ve written over the many years that have been performed and recorded with a changing group of musicians (co-conspirators) known collectively as the band Lavapop.
The name Lavapop was coined by very good friend and musical partner/supporter/encourager Michael Jerome after he voiced his concern that the previous chosen name for ongoing outfit sounded too silly, and I said "okay, what do you think would be a good name?" And, Michael came up with Lavapop. Sounds good to me. Michael has either played drums or percussion or even guitar on nearly every ’professional’ recording I’ve ever recorded.
I’m not exactly sure how he came up with the name, probably a story best left for him to tell, but the name seemed catchy, people were intrigued, and at the time and I did use to describe my songs as an attempt at capturing a red hot emotional expeirence or moment, and encapsulating it within the confines/medium of a 3-5 minute pop/rock format song. Of course, now that seems kind of contrived, but the ’red hot emotional’ might have led to the "lava" and the musical convention of the pop song format to the "pop", but I might be reading too much into this. Many years later I learned that Lavapop translates in Finnish to Stage Pop, pretty cool.
All the songs that will be posted here are songs I first wrote on my own with guitar in hand usually at night either on a horse ranch, looking out over a lake, in a cramped city apartment or in a friend’s guest room. I’d work up all the lyrics and core arrangements/chord progressions of the songs and then present these skeletons to the band for fleshing out. And, I’ve been very lucky to play with some excellent musicians towards the end of making some really good music. In additional to Michael, these songs would not sound the way they do without the wide ranging musical talents and contributions from bassist Gary Adgate and guitarists Greg Ellenwood, Rio Wallace, Niklas Schonbeck, and Mike Graff. There are of course some songs that were written by the band together, jammed out from scratch or based on a presented idea, but for the sake of simplicity, since I’m now not today in touch with everyone who’s ever been involved, I’m going to hold off on posting those songs or releasing them until all permissions are granted there.
And, while attempting to be sure to give credit where it’s due, I also need to thank Producer/Engineer David Rosenblad for his high quality production work with me/us on two very different projects, one in the early nineties, and the other towards the end of the decade.
In theory, I’ll be posting, eventually, songs here written over the last twenty years, some take from a cassette four tack recorded in the gargage, ans some fully produced multi-layered works.
I should mention that this website is definitely UNDER CONSTRUCTION. I’m planning to post more background information and eventually all my recorded songs as sort of a streaming online archive. Technically speaking, I’m going to post the audio files as streaming mp3’s accessible via a Flash audio player with the idea that if you like them and want to download them, let me know and/or I'll be posting links to iTunes for that further down the road.
Thanks for visiting and I hope you’ll find something here of merit.
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