There were still sex workers on Van Buren St. when the airport shuttle rolled up to my flophouse motel near Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix yesterday morning at 8 a.m.

After tumbling out of bed at 4 a.m., I had jumped on an early commuter flight from Austin and was joining my bandmate, keyboardist Ryan Williams, for a session in a make-shift recording studio we set up for a day on the Boulevard Périphérique of Western civilization.

Note the Gideon’s Bible on our recording console (our “desk,” as we say in recording arts parlance).

We were energized by the fact that our band Nous Non Plus had been featured as “band of the day” on the now ubiquitous Band of the Day App.

But the greatest counterpoint to the bleak glimmer of sun-burnt, crystal meth-tinged Phoenix was the fact that both of us would be home in time to kiss our kids goodnight: Ryan, dad to two beautiful boys, had driven down from Flagstaff for the morning, and I had flown in especially for the session. We began tracking at 8:30 a.m. and I was on an Austin-bound 2:40 p.m. flight that got me home in time for dinner.

When I dreamed of a career in pop music as a child, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.

But when you’re a new dad, you don’t need late-night, smoke-filled rock clubs to make the jams flow…

Ryan’s playing was fantastic, the sounds groovy and warm, and Tracie P’s cooking never tasted better (shredded chicken and roast poblano pepper tacos and cilantro rice paired with bright, fresh Schiava)…

The working title of our forthcoming album (fall 2012) is “Le Sex et Le Politique”…