A radical departure from the solo work, Caffeine Smile (the name) was taken from an earlier Midnight Snack sound called Howl. There was a line in there about going to work with the ending “Put on that caffeine smile”. When it came time to choose a new band name, this was an easy choice.

This was STILL before “everything is on the internet” days, so in spite of being a professional technologies, the internet presence and focus for Caffeine Smile was minimal. So let me know if anybody needs a Caffeine Smile CD. Still have a few dozen laying around if you actually have a CD player in your life (haha!).

If you just want to give it a listen, here is Caffeine Smile on Bandcamp.

The band was really just taking off, playing shows, and polishing a record when the opportunity to move to Austin came about. I was actually in 3 bands at the time BMP (metal), Recovery Junkies (covers), and Caffeine Smile. It was necessary to be in multiple bands to have the opportunity to play out once or twice a month in Phoenix. Its just not a great music town.

At one point CS was looking for a possible 4th guitar and although that setting didn’t work out, it launched a collaboration with Ray Hanky, who was MUCH more metal that CS wanted to be.

Blueblood Monkey Project (BMP)

With the FPC history so far behind me, I felt a longing to express myself in that hard rock/heavy metal style again, and Ray was a perfect partner for this. We had a fairly disconnected collaboration style where he would write pretty much an entire song, and I would come in over the top after the fact, write vocals, which he would later record and mix.

I thoroughly enjoyed both bands, and although we only tried a few times to get bandmates together and make a real band of BMP, we continued to collaborate, resulting in a number of songs, also available on Bandcamp.

These songs ended up being a fair documentary of my post-divorce experience with my “rebound” girlfriend (is that a term we use in divorce scenarios? Or just girlfriends?)