Greetings friends and fans ! 

I hope you enjoy my new site! We’ve got a long way to go but it’s slowly coming together. The fault is entirely mine; my webmistress Christie has done a great job and it is only my laziness to blame for not having more features and music for sale; bear with us. 

As you may have heard, HLN has the title song on the upcoming Seth Rogan summer release "Pineapple Express". Since the press has a way of jumping on "Star Power" for effect (and usually getting the story wrong in the process), I thought I’d take a couple paragraphs to explain how this all came about. 

Many years ago my friend and songwriting partner, David Fredericks, had a song called "Forget About It". I always thought the song had potential but never figured out how to take it further. One night after a HLN show and a few ’Shastas’ the discussion came around to a new opening song for the set. Huey had a title and I said I had a tune that I thought I could plug it into. I reworked Dave’s old tune and made a pretty snappy little uptempo demo tentatively titled "Let’s Move". 

Meanwhile this offer comes through the office to compose and record a song for "Pineapple Express". In all honesty, I don’t believe Huey or I knew who Seth Rogan was at the time, but I mentioned that it certainly couldn’t hurt our career by getting a cut on a movie like a million other acts were doing. I scratched the old lyrics to "Let’s Move" on my demo and sang a rough vocal using "Pineapple Express" as the hook. Huey scratched out some lyrics and we laid down a verse and chorus with his voice on my demo. We sent it off to the powers that be, they liked what they heard, and HLN went in the studio and cut the track proper for the movie; the song that took five years to go public! Hope you enjoy what we came up with; it sounds a lot like HLN to me! 

Meanwhile, for better or for worse, HLN has an outrageously busy schedule this year; good, because it’s nice to feel wanted. Bad, because it leaves me little time to work on my own project. I know I keep talking about it, and the truth is I have it all figured out; finding the time to get in the studio and get it done is the hard part. 

So no more deadline promises; I’ll get to it when I get to it! But I’ll drop a couple more hints; I’ll have lots of singers on this new project, and a very special guest guitarist! ’Nuff said . . . 

HLN is off to Japan the second week of April and finishing up some demo work in May. I’m currently figuring out a way to archive all of our audio and video at our rehearsal hall, we’ve installed a full-blown digital recording system there, and I’m tweaking the room with the hope that we can actually cut tracks there from start to finish; told you I was busy . . . 

I hope to see you all out on the road his year, and keep an eye on this site for updates and improvements; I’m so CRAZY over my webmistress, I married her! 

Cheers, 

Johnny