Kira, I've been pretty impressed with the Martin D16 series and from a sound standpoint, I don't find that many of them give up much to the old D18s,21s,28s and 35s. This twelve seems to sound just as good as my D12-28 did, if not better. I played a D16 rosewood-gloss-top six-string in the local GC the other day and it really played nicely. It seemed to sound quite decent, too (Mini-Rant: If you are going to go to the trouble to build a fancy, wood-paneled, sound-proof room for testing acoustic guitars and keeping the shredder **** out, why equip it with half-a-dozen of the cheapest, noisiest humidifiers that money can possibly buy and turn them all on at once?)
No new songs at the moment. I have the basic structure figured out for one and a second one that has all the instrumental tracks recorded and mixed, but no words....It currently has two tracks of possible phrases and a lot of three-part mumbling, but I'm stuck on real lyrics. One thing about writing fairly simple songs is that the lyrics better be pretty good or the whole thing is a bust. They usually come to me in a flash and it takes about 30 minutes to write all the lyrics for a song. The problem is that the flash could come tomorrow, or ten years from tomorrow.
Plenty of old songs though - fifty-two of them to be exact. I've spent most of the winter doing graphics for the website for our old band and four different CD covers. We found boxes of old studio tapes and have assembled two CDs of previously unreleased stuff. One of them is already out. Then we have one more old album from the period after I left the band which we have re-mastered and converted to a digital. It's being pressed, printed, burned, or whatever they do to them as we speak. The third will be ready to go in a couple of weeks. After those, one of the Warner Music Group companies (probably Wounded Bird Records) is going to re-release our original Elektra album from 1972 within the next three months or so.
The first CD came out about two weeks ago and is some of our very early, acoustic-folky stuff from '71 and '72. It's hard to believe that I was only 19-20 years old when the tapes were made. Time flies. If we're lucky, they might pay for a few sessions to record some new stuff. You can hear low-quality but workable clips from the first CD at CD Baby. Once all four disks are out, there will be a pretty interesting progression from the light-hearted folky stuff of the early years through the later, electrified, more rocky music. No great ambitions, but as mid-life crisis activities go, it's cheaper than buying sportscars and less hassle than a mistress.
http://cdbaby.com/cd/theship2
I'm obviously biased because I designed it, but I think it also has the coolest looking disk face I've ever seen on a CD.
That's a beauty, Todd. You'll never regret that one. I bought a new D-16RGT last year and the honeymoon is still not over 
I hope you'll put her to work and post some new songs soon 
