Music by Jonathan Machen

Updated 3-28-26

The first group: ‘Recent Recordings’ is practice, and contains both covers and originals. I’ve posted these to show what I’ve been working on.  I find that by teaching myself to memorize, play and record songs, I can play them better.  I honor a number of songwriters here,: Joni Mitchell, Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter, Van Morrison, John Denver, Jimmy Page,  John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Coburn, Robbie Robertson.

Recordings following ‘Recent Recordings’ are all my own compositions, with the exception of the songs in the collection, ‘Waiting at the Bus Stop With Yang’, which was co-written with Tony Ward.

One note about the tuning pattern I attach to some of these titles. Take, for example, C93754. This is notation for the way I’ve tuned the guitar for any particular song. in the case of C93754, C refers to the lowest (6th) string. When pressing the 9th fret on that string, you can hear the note to tune the next (5th) string, and son on. I’m using open C tuning for a lot of these, which I initially learned when trying to learn Bryon-Y-Aur by Jimmy Page (listed below). Some of my invented tunings, as well as many of the Joni Mitchell tunings, are quite unusual, which I note that in the titles of songs.