Edit history

Hi, my name is Hammond. This is my first album, Million Dollar Smile. I've been writing songs for longer than I care to admit to. My father helped me write my first tune. I was sitting in my bedroom, tinkering with the piano, trying as it turned out to rewrite let it be. My father comes in, a quite man at the best of times and immediately recognizes what I'm trying to do. Kids learn through example and right there, right then he started to help me. I always wished we could have written more together. This album is all about me summoning up that moment in time and us finishing that session. I've had a lifelong fascination for how modern music started. Country music, jazz, Vaudeville, Ragtime, Boogie, Rhythm and blues, the romance of Broadway and Hollywood and how all of these influences came together on a couple of New York streets in the 1920s to give rise to the modern song. This album sets itself in that time and does its best to sound like it too. The stripped back blues recordings from Chicago. The jazzy cornet infused pop tunes from New York. The great American songbook that was being written at a breakneck pace in between the skyscrapers of West 27th St to West 50th. All of this occupies the thoughts that inspire the lyrics and the rhythms that drive the tunes of Million Dollar Smile. What I love the most about tin pan alley is that it took everything around that was popular and didn’t represent any of it in the way it would’ve wanted to be represented. Those tunesmiths took what they needed for their songs and created a musical idiom that practically all songwriters would use to write with in the future. Mindblowing stuff.