David Stanley is a friend of mine and a musical connoisseur without equal in my world. Earlier this year, he joined me in the studio for one of my 300 songs: "This Masquerade" by Leon Russell. A lot has happened since I started that project, but I still wanted to complete this video (and one other you'll see soon). When I dug up the footage, I saw our first run-through, and thought it would be cool to post it, so you could see the "before" as well as the "after".

I remember in jazz class they call it "woodshedding" - where you start learning a piece, rehearsing it, and getting your parts down. We clearly don't have our parts down here, since it was our first rehearsal of the piece and I was sight reading the music. We spent a goodly amount of time in the wood shed before we recorded the final track.

So here's essentially the "first draft" of the song. You'll see where we went with it in a future episode.