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In the Grain On his premiere recording, guitarist Darin Mahoney bridges a dark phase of C(rises) Major to a life of full-scale harmony November 3, 2008, Phoenix, AZ-Months after guitarist Darin Mahoney emerged from a medically induced coma he was still unable to form even the simplest chords with his fingers. And still, with that, Mahoney had to consider himself lucky By all rights, and by his own doctor's admission, he shouldn't have been alive at all. Listeners will find that harrowing tale among the many facets of one artist's complex journey in the notes and tones on In the Grain (Rexomatic Productions), Mahoney's first full-length recording. On the CD's eight tracks-Confused, The Hunt, Woodland, Green, Alger Street, Calling Home, Tanglewood, and Top Down -Mahoney (playing the koa-and-western-red-cedar acoustic he built himself) offers an instrumental interpretation of a life that seemed irretrievably lost, but through intense struggle endured and ultimately flourished. Beginning in his high-school days, Mahoney was a guitar player and a rodeo rider. On the six string he started out with bluegrass tunes; in the rodeo ring he was a bareback rider. It wasn't too long before his music, and his life, became much more rock-and-roll electric. He worked hard and played hard from early on, which eventually led to a ruthless downfall. 'I partied much too much. I got addicted, wasted an important stretch of my life, ' Mahoney says. 'There's an eight -year period in there that I think of as the Dark Time. Not everyone who has a spell like that comes out the other side. It was just luck that I did.' As it turned out, that exit led to a place that no one could have anticipated. In early 1996, not long after he had begun to straighten his life out, Mahoney was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. 'I was visiting my parents, ' says Mahoney, 'and making some breakfast. I just passe
