The Hard Rain Project

In 1986, I saw Dylan in concert at the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa, California. When he came out on stage alone with his acoustic guitar in the middle of the show, 20,000 people hushed and listened. The song that blew me away was "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall." Upon seeking out the record and reading the liner notes I was captured by his comment that the song had been written during the cold war, and that every line was really the beginning of a whole other song he thought he would never get to write. Ever since, I have thought that writing those songs would be an interesting thing to try to do. I finally took the project on in February 2009 and completed it in January 2016. The recordings presented here are drafts of each of these 37 songs, some are a bit rough around the edges, others are more like finished versions. They are not necessarily an attempt to imitate Dylan (although some clearly nod), not an attempt to try to write the songs he would have written.

You can download a file with all 37 songs using the button below, or go to the bottom of the page to get them as separate collections, mainly gathered by the year I wrote them. The first 14 songs are also available on a CD available through CD Baby and streaming on apple, spotify and amazon.

Download All Songs