Yes life has taken a heavy hand on this guy for the last couple of months but after a few good days and nights recently, of gut checking I have found a new resolve!! Since I was a youngster hippie boy running around the country I have searched, tried and explored many a soul searching techniques to give me some ammo to deal with the curve balls livin' has a tendency to throw at ya. Some worked a bit, some failed miserably but the one's that always have kept me a goin' were writing songs, holding my guitar and applying my ole' 95% rule. Not to mention my love and admiration for the opposite sex and that infernal smile that won't leave my face!! Heck if you had to look at something like me in the mirror every morning you'd at least have to start the day out laughing. Anyway I guess I just wanted to share some of this with my friends been quite a year or so for. I hope you forgive my indulgence with this but maybe we all have more in common than we know, for your sakes I hope not too much. Over the last year or so a few things occurred:
1. got divorced from a nice lady
2. suddenly found my self without 50% of the household income
3. almost lost my house,van,underwear, and just about everything else
4. scrambled like a wild rooster to get things changed so I could survive alone
5. had complete hip replacement surgery
6. lost a couple of band members and got ole' Elmer thank god, love that guy.
7. had both a record label and record distributor go bankrupt on my hillbilly butt
8. had the long arm of the law hand me some paper that said DUI on it etc. etc.
9. the frickin' economy has hit the toilet not to mention the corruption & lyin' and all, making trust a big looser
10. a damn war is going on, right or wrong, but pretty darn worrisome

So all that at times made the 95 % rule a bit difficult to follow, took real work and if you know me you know I hate work !!! (guess I should explain the 95% rule here for newcomers, it is one of my personal laws that I follow which is " I must be happy, smilin', and enjoying the mysteries of life at least 95 % of the time. Anything below that percentage is the WARNING to me, something HAS to be done to handle the negative drain and wear & tear. That way I only allow 5% of my time to be spent sad, worried, feeling down or a grouchy dude.) So I guess that's my excuse for not be timely in the neighborhood update seems I spent a lot of energy and time just booking gigs, playing gigs and fighting to keep the 95% thang in. But now..... there is a new fire burning, a wild excitement about being able to be creative and a new love of my friends and fans that make it all so damn worthwhile!!

If your lookin' at the gig list things are mellowing down for the winter here but not to fear, the fellers and I are about ready to be makin' another Heartsfield CD and I can't wait. This one is gonna be done in a real down home fashion. I mean real down home because we are gonna do it at home, that's right with the fire place a burnin', the dogs shagged out of the house when vocals are cut (this will be the only studio I know where the dogs go in the isolation booth rather than the performers!!) and engineer Perry in his favorite Pajama's. I love recording in PJ'S somehow gets you in the right mood. Now to do all this a fine young lady/song writer gal/ friend O' mine Carol Turner has helped me out with the purchases of some mighty mighty fine recording gear. Yes siree' it's simply amazing the gear one can buy, own, create on and operate. However the OPERATE is the one sticking point, this ole' German/Hillbilly has to learn to actually make all this NASA type machinery work !!!
You ought to see this thing, 200 hundred buttons that all do 3 or 4 tasks apiece, you use this thing called a modifier button, you know like Cmmd+ C to copy in a computer, OOPS's that is on a Mac not sure what you PC fellers do. Yes I admit to being in love with my Mac's and I'm sure you know of the great divide between Mac and PC users, very akin to the battles like North vs. South, Cubs vs. Sox fans, Bears vs. Packers,
Womens and Mens, Dog vs. Cat people. Ain't it funny how human beings can find so many ways to grab on to something to disagree about, I do declare I guess these things put some fun in our lives somehow.

Anyway after weeks of deep research into every possible style and approach to recording gear I made my decision and ordered the gear. Now just as with almost everything in this "new world" there are at least 100 choices for anything you want to buy and I mean everything. Just look at any item, printers, cameras, toilet paper, Vodka, cell phones, cigarettes, on-line dating services, TV sets, bottled water etc. etc. Now the water one really gets to me, how different can pure spring natural clean unadulterated waters be !! And if they are, can they truly be just pure water, now I could understand if a few of them got their water from one of those sulfur egg smelling wells like I had when I was a kid, you know the kind where you have to put a 50 LB bag of salt in a water softener, but I haven't seen one with a nice brown tinge to it yet. We all know they boil the shit out of that stuff, run it through micro filters and purify the dickens out of it so to my mind any difference in taste (if any) is an additive !!! Thus I digress as usual.

Anyway so that is what is up for most of the winter, writing new songs, recording a new CD and playing a few gigs here and there. At this point the only show I have booked is Jan 24th in St. Louis with some old mentors of mine Poco, ahhh a CO-bill with those fellers I used to get wasted lay under black light art and crank the headphones to all night, my how this ole' world turns around. So we have a lot of work to do and we want to put out a great great record for all our friends and fans. Now I just have to get my mind into some heavy lyric writing, I want to get back to the place I was at when ole Heartsfield first started and I could write just from the soul, heart and pictures in my head. Sometimes getting a bit older and involved in just livin' day to day, makin' a living, can take away some of that freshness and raw uncomplicated view of the world. Like I said in Just So Hard To Do It, we need a reason to keep on believing, Lord we've got to find some soul. I guess that's where I want to get to deep in the soul again was so much easier with the advantage of youth as the driving force, you know like we could fight fix or change anything.
Hum, maybe some of that French brown tinged water will help.

As most of you probably know the music business is not exactly in a warm, fuzzy, creative, let's support the arts, kind of vibe as of late. No sir it's become a more dog eat dog world in this biz and it's getting pressured from many sides, example: half of America is scared to death to have a few adult beverages over an evening and drive home after a fun show. Now as I observe this, it seems like we are going through a resurgence of bible thumpin', political correctness crazin', stickin' noses in everybody else's business craziness, that is becoming OK with the majority of folks. Now I am not talking about being sloshed to the gills and acting like a person should be driving home endangering themselves or others but .o8 Come On, that's a couple of beers over a few a hours and cold remedies are almost that strong. Most folks I know have been through the sixties / seventies and their bodies are more than able to handle a few drinks and maintain themselves in a reasonable and responsible fashion. Shit if we didn't crash from the wild ass stuff we did back then what are they thinking. Any self respecting old hippie/party person could handle a lot of indulgence before they wimp out and get dangerous or out of control. There is some hidden folks behind the scenes pushing all this crap and I think it is some bored out of their asses, frustrated psychiatrist seeing, not getting laid, hate to see others havin' fun, hypocritical, I know better than you people.

I am sick and tired of their shit, can't smoke, can't eat McDonalds, can't have half naked cheerleaders, can't buy a beer past the 7th inning, can't call a garbage man a garbage man(he's a sanitation engineer), can't sleep with a women without a release form, can't call people ugly ,fat, dumb, short, looser, retarded etc., can't have kids fail in school (just move 'em on anyway), can't have a kid try out for a team and have the couch say "You suck this year come back next year", can't burn garbage, can't burn leaves, can't paint your house a weird color, can't eat butter, bacon, French fries, eggs, can't drink coffee, caffeine cola's, !!!!! Have you seen some of these soda drinks !!!
No sugar • no cafe • no sodium • no artificial colors • no flavor • no equal • no nothin •, can't joke about hillbillys, krauts, Italians, Blacks, Polish, Latino's, illegal aliens,

There's a whole industry of people out there that has the job of thinking up things we can't do. The list is endless
and grows exponentially everyday. Pretty darn soon it will be hard to come out of your home and drive, talk and interact with folks because there won't be anything we can do. As I see it instead of the powers that be in all these various aspects of society tellin' us what we can't do it would be much simpler to tells us what's left we can do.
Printed up that should take maybe one or two 3 X 5 index cards at the most, to cover all of it. All this is making a whole new look on our world of weakness, lack of personal responsibility and everybody blaming everything bad on everyone but themselves !!! How in the world will old sayings like " pick up the pieces and go on"" what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, " "it's better to have tried and failed than to not try at all" " if at first you do not succeed" "take the bull by the horns"and a whole lot more still be part of our language and lessons in life. I admire the dickens out of grizzly old timers who are tough as nails, don't whine and do what has to be done, we can learn a lot from those folks.

Anyway the Can't Industry, the Oughta Not Industry, the Political Correctness Industry ought to take a hiatus for a while and I bet ya when they came back many of the things that are plaguing our lives now would work themselves out, folks could talk openly again and jokes could be told without everybody getting so offended and just maybe we would all try harder to do better for ourselves and each other.

One more thing, it's usually the keepers of morality, it's the one's who scream the loudest like Bill Bennet, Ole' Rush Limbaugh always railing on dope smokin', maggot infested burnt out low life's, degenerate sinners, useless drunks etc. that when the their secret story finally comes to light we see a lot of what they are screaming about is what they're doin' themselves. Maybe we could go back to not being so thin skinned and sensitive to everything and try to enjoy the differences between us, maybe we could except the fact that everybody who has succeeded and done great things failed more times than succeeded but learned the lessons and fought again. All these preaching, talking heads, rush to judgment experts when it comes down to it are after mostly money and career's, and I don't think they have a right to be tellin' everyone their beliefs are the only right and true one's while they are doing all the things we all are as human beings. Hypocrite seems to be the new IN Thing now days but one thing real folks know that we all have failings and strength's and we are all wrong and right at times so CHILL DUDES OF THE SCREAMING MORAL TOWN CRIERS ASSOCIATIONS AND WORLD ORDER INCORPORATION'S. OOPPS damn darn it, maybe I have been preachin' too !!!!
Well to cure that I am gonna have a soda with lots of sugar, extra shot of caffeine, extra sodium, and a designer dash of artificial color, maybe teal, I like teal, I want a teal colored soda NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway have a great holiday season here this week next issue I will be examining the whole hub bub of the up coming Holiday Shopping Marathon and Extravaganza. LOVE YOU ALL, KEEP ON SMILIN".