Hi VanceFan!

Friday 12/20 Piermont NY The Turning Point - www.turningpointcafe.com - One of the longest played Vance History venues ever. Tix are going kinda quickly, but there are seats left.

Sat 12/21 - Sicklerville NJ - Tina’s Funny Bone Court Private House Concert That You’re Invite To If You MIssed Vance In Philly Like She Did. tmphi11ips@aol.com. I swear. That’s what this is. Tina will have great snacks, I promise.

Future Plays:

1/25 - Westport CT - Voices Cafe
2/1 - Cambridge MA - Club Passim - 2 shows ALBUM RELEASE SHOW
2/8 - Davie FL - South Florida Folk Festival
2/15 - Pomfret CT - Vanilla Bean
2/16 - Park Ridge NJ - Acoustic Cafe

PRIVATE POST-HOLIDAY PARTIES - they’re moving to January because so many December dates got used up! Contact me, as there are 2 for January as we speak. get me now because when the album hits time avail will get short…

CHECK OUT THE ALBUM PREVIEWS/REVIEWS:
https://divinemagazine.biz/vance-gilberts-new-album-good-good-man-out-jan-24-2020/

https://glidemagazine.com/237237/video-premiere-vance-gilbert-croons-soulful-70s-folk-on-title-track-good-good-man-off-forthcoming-lp/

https://www.bluesmagazine.nl/vance-gilbert-good-good-man-featuring-chris-smither-tommy-malone/

- Good Good Man's release date is 1/24/20 (streaming and download happens then too), but sure, you can get one from me at any show
• PayPal to - vancefunder@gmail.com
• check for anything between $10 - $20 and up to Vancefunder P.O. Box 17 Arlington, MA 02476
• **If your name is on the CD, you’re a friend, family member, promoter, radio/podcast personage, cash strapped, or anyone else that thinks they should just have one, send me your address and just ask and I’ll send it.**

-Post-Holiday Soirées, coaching of songwriting, performance & voice, custom stapler painting available upon request.

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GOOD GOOD MAN - THE MOVIE

I thought you’d get a kick. This publicist wanted, in 4-5 hours, 5 sentences of so about each tune on the album for his publicity purposes. I had fun with that, so I thought I’d share that narrative with you:

Pie & Whiskey - Truth is, I was playing in a convention room called Pie and Whiskey (that’s what they served for snacks!), and I mistakenly thought one had to write a song with those ingredients in it, so I wrote this in the car on the way. James Taylor meets Al Jarreau meets Johnny Rivers meets D’Angelo meets Randy Newman meets Jason Isbell at Freddy Fender’s house was my 4-way crossroads on this gathering of philosophies. Oh, was that 7 people? Whatever. We’re back in the acoustic and soulful ’70’s. Remember Amos Garret’s solo on Maria Muldar’s Midnight At The Oasis? Well, Tommy Malone of the Subdudes gets that feel here.

Good, Good Man - I’ll be honest. I was shooting for that ’60’s - ’70’s R&B/country/soul feel again. This could just as easily be another country/soul thing, ballad-style. Brooke Benton. Frankie Beverly. Al Green. Smokey Robinson. How dare I align myself with those alum, yes, but that’s the idea I was shooting for. Tommy Malone finishes the portrait for me again. (some of the guitar is mine, however…just saying..)

Trust - A string of paranoid admonitions! This is my Stevie Wonder/Richard Thompson/Earth Wind & Fire Horns cut. A little geography and history, and a funky backbeat, and maybe it’ll be included as a download in a future community college textbook or something. A guy can wish. That’s Al Green’s organist Stacy Wade playing too. The studio dogs Layla and Marley loved him.

Cousin Shelly’s Station Wagon - I put the guitar down altogether for Herb Gardner’s barroom piano on this heading-toward-Tom Waits pining for someone lost, and the subsequent mixed gift of their rediscovery.

Zombie Pattycake - One slow day I was wondering what the Zombies in The Walking Dead and its Living Dead cousins do when there’s no one to eat and they get bored. So I says to myself “What’s the simplest game someone with half-functioning arms can play when they meet one of their brethren?”
Musically It’s Louis Jordan meets Leo Kottke if I may be so bold.

Flyby - My actual undergrad degree is in biology, so there’s always science in my blood. This started out not unlike my song Goodbye Pluto, innocently talking about flying objects in space, and it morphed into this Nick Drake-ish treatise on being safe yet stuck. Friend and Alt Rock notable Mike Posner lends his strikingly heartbroken-high voice to the outer edges of this otherwise solo thing.

Another Great Day Above Ground - A country-blues that was born from an older friend who said, when asked how he was, "if I put my elbows out and don’t feel wood, then I know it’s another great day above ground..”. I knew my friend Chris Smither would play this far better than I ever could, so I called him for his first-ever guitar and stomp-foot hiring in his long and wondrous career. He thinks it’ll look great on his resume. Yeah, whatever, like he needs *that*.

Hitman - It’s a movie I made up in my head. From seeming doddering innocence to utter Soprano goes this old fellow, his later life story and worries illuminated in between. I was worried that I was pushing hard on the feel of this until the genius of Craig Akin's (Red Molly) added bass and more Tommy Malone guitar, and that push became the urgent that propels this story.

When I Cross Over - My wish for what Heaven might actually be, in waltz time, with Herb Gardner’s piano answering my guitar here and there.

Brunswick County - I had promised a song to a promoter in Bolivia, Brunswick County, North Carolina for a compilation CD promoting their next season. Anything snatched off of a CD of mine would do. I put it off and forgot. The promoter contacts me months later with a sigh, “ I guess you didn’t really want to be part..”. I’m sheepishly “Yes! Yes I do…when do you go to master?” She says “Tomorrow afternoon at 2pm”. I researched, wrote, and recorded the song over a friend's house and Dropboxed it to her by 12:30 the next afternoon. Yes the solo Celtic feel is because I had recently discovered Paul Brady. Aine Minogue’s harp and vocal were a no brainer, as she lives up the street.

Wildflower - Done solo here, with just the guitar and 2 mics. A song from my early teen years, 1972, like 9th grade, original done by the Canadian group Skylark. Some of the song’s history is amazing. I love this story …It was written by a friend of the band’s after a failed first date with a hospice nurse who had 2 of her favorite clients die in one day. He went to pick her up and she came to the door utterly broken. She promised to pull it together for dinner so she headed to her room while he waited in her livingroom. After 20 quiet minutes, he chanced a peek, finding her out cold across her bed in a dress, shoes in her hand. He gentlemanly folded the covers over her, let himself out, and went home and wrote the song. I love this story.

The Day Before November - This was almost the title of the CD. Part Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, part Gil Scott Heron’s pretty much anything, part Sugar Hill Gang, and mostly intimate look at my childhood brought me this poem. I did it once with music but found it didn’t really need it. It was one of those things for which I had the images and storyline simmering for over a decade. It took 2 weeks to write, and 2-1/2 months to memorize while out walking my dogs at night. Poor dogs and poor open-windowed neighbors the fall of 2016...

xo, and peace… vg