Night Rider is an Instrumental Guitar Piece that I wrote while on my "Magical Wonderland Tour" in 2007... the repetitive rhythmic background, like a familiar landscape, ever changing through the seasons carries the minds eye to new images with each turn of the ear. The Cover Art of Night Rider is a composite of three images... the obvious one being of the moon... which I took somewhere prior in the 1990s when I had a 35mm "film" camera mounted on a telescope. The second image is one of a moth that landed on the glass of my front door in 2011, and with inside light against the dark of night gave me the privilege of taking both stills and videos of the creature with a HD Digital Video Camera... then replacing the black background with green... so I could superimpose the moth over the moon using chroma key software. Lastly, I had this image of myself from at about fifty years ago, when I was probably about twelve years old playing guitar. I replaced the background with green and placed this figure on the apparently flying moth... so as to look as if I were riding on a giant moth away from the moon. The mysteries of the night abound, some very pleasant... and some quite scary... especially when you are driving down the road in the middle of the morning on the way from one venue to another on tour. Anything can happen in the night, even an perhaps encounter with a guitarist on a giant moth. As a child I seemed to be on a journey to find that Golden Chord... that sound of something that I had first heard prior to my birth. During the nine months preceding my entrance into this world my mother played the guitar. Although I was entombed in that place called The Womb... as we all are while we await that shock of reality called life, I no doubt heard the sound of the guitar. Many experts have told me that this is most definitely so, and it is assumed that when finally getting my bearings on this new world I was trying to find out what that sound was that enchanted my arrival. Therefore I was searching... I was on tour from the start to discover that sound... like The Holy Grail itself... to find The Golden Chord. So it is that this Cover Art of "Night Rider" represents not just an expression of the traveling down highways and such... but the traveling of those "Back Roads Of The Mind" into a past that preceded the so called beginning, a past before the past as we know it. Additional Text: I Am Guitar... I was born to the guitar... it is as if it was one of my parents. During the nine months preceding my entrance into this world, my mother played the guitar several hours each day. Less than one hour prior to her giving birth to me she had been playing guitar for several hours as she would do for hours on end. It is a matter of very clear understanding by many experts in numerous fields of medical science and other areas of study and there is no doubt I came into this life with a pre-disposition and awareness of the sound of music played on a guitar... and more than likely affected by this phenomena that the very essence of myself is intimately connected to that audio imagery... the unique sound of the guitar. So, it by this that I can definitively say "I Am Guitar"... or at least from the very beginning of my own existence... The Guitar Is With Me... Let Us Play. My name is Craig Smith... and I play the guitar from within the deepest part of my being. To me I hear and visualize within my mind the totality of all music, guitar or otherwise, just as if it were a physical object that I can see with my eyes. To me music is like a landscape we travel through as if one were on tour seeing three dimensional objects with all there characteristics and having the clear ability to navigate among them... knowing all the right moves necessary to avoid errors in making the wrong move, stumbling or bumping into something. When people ask me how they can hear the changes in the chords of a song... I explain how and show them the way to really be a part of the music... and to have no more difficulty doing this than walking around their home without misjudging where a doorway is, or driving a car without seeing and knowing how and when to turn, slow down, stop and go... or parallel park. It's no great mystery once the truth is know as described even by the Greek Mathematician and Philosopher "Pythagoras" who understood that music is a Three Dimensional Audio Form... just as the world around us is a solid and visible one. My experience hearing music on the guitar before I was born was just a training ground for this mystical world of sound. I just had the uncluttered privilege of experiencing The Way Music Works a little earlier than some others. Yet... it can be learned by anyone with a pair of ears that function reasonably well. All the aspects of the thing we call music are merely hearing and instinctively about making the right moves. The regular practices of reading and counting the values of music notes is of extreme value in the area of knowledge and education... but just like in daily activities when we walk, talk and interact with the environment and individuals we encounter... we don't have to calculate distances, measure or count steps we take or pull out a small guidebook to have a normal conversation with another person. We do these things just naturally. Of course it is helpful to be aware of the systematic elements of measurements of the physical world, and the rules of grammar establishing good speech and more... but we do not think or generally use these things in our millions of movements and such each day. We are instinctive by nature and act automatically to basically survive in daily life. All the structure of knowledge including that of music knowledge came thousands of years after human beings did anything they do as valuable ways of remembering and teaching others elements of better understanding and doing things, but we did things first and then created ways to retain and describe what it was we had done. No one wrote it down first and then said now I think I can do this or that. We have to regain confidence in our natural human instinctive behavior... a gift we have long forgotten we were given at birth as a right of life... along with it's counterpart creativity... the stolen human right. This is not to say we should not use the valuable lexicons we have on performing all activities, but if we over establish the premise that everything must follow the directions as if they are dictated on a map of some sort we can become too focused on the map and drive off the road into a ditch. We do not follow little guidebooks, maps or GPS directions in 99% of daily activities. We have to be extremely on guard to avoid too much so called help... and use our inner "gut awareness"... these abilities are a gift from birth... Instinct. Playing and hearing the true aspects of music is no different, we must be aware first... and then use the guidance available for assistance and refining moves and increasing our ability to survive better, with more ease... and a better outcome. Craig Smith