Atheists in Mecca is a lo-fi, solo acoustic guitar, alternative rock protest song about the global fight against theocracy and the need for cross cultural, international resistance to anti-secular forces in every nation on Earth.

This song was was recorded live, alone, just me and a Tanglewood acoustic guitar, with one microphone, a Blue Snowball, and mastered in Audacity on my busted up Lenovo laptop, in a low budget hotel room in Tunis, Tunisia. How and why it was recorded this way is a long story.

In 2017 I decided to come out of my years long musical hiatus and write and record a new album. The first song I completed was loosely based on a 20 year old instrumental of mine called "Dirty Dishes". This song was recorded on a TASCAM 8 track, in a live-in-the-studio solo acoustic guitar style in the studio apartment I shared with my wife in Alamogordo, New Mexico and released as a single. For those interested, the song is called "Magical Markets and Magical Mules". It was intended to be part of an album of all new songs and instrumentals called "Opaque Windows", named after an instrumental I wrote to please my wife, based on a Hindu scale pattern I would frequently improvise on.

fast forward to today and a lot has happened and most of it has led to delay after delay and obstacle after obstacle in the way of my completion of a new album. First and foremost, my wife came home to her home country of Tunisia and, along with her sister, was in a horrific car accident that nearly killed them both, made my wife paralyzed from the waist down, and has kept her sister bedridden for more than a year now.

Prior to this event I was attempting to make a masterpiece with nothing more than an acoustic guitar, an 8 track recording unit, a cheap microphone, and the very small amount of time I could afford to work on music between my long and unpredictable shifts as a concrete mixer driver. My efforts at recording while my wife was on vacation with her family were hampered by a severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome and technical problems which made it near impossible to get a decent recording. As a result, the original sessions in my apartment in Alamogordo yielded only one track worthy of release and even that was far less stellar in the sonic department than I had hoped for.

(...to be continued.)