Kevin Riordan: New CD is 'Healthy Food for Thought' for Moorestown musician

Willing to put his mouth where the money is, singer-songwriter Tim Gleeson will perform selections from his solo CD, No Sad Songs, at your place.

"They're called house concerts . . . there's lots of stuff about them on Google," Gleeson says in his Moorestown home studio, a pleasant, orderly space full of guitars and recording equipment. "I've done a couple so far."

Such is the low-fi yet high-tech life of a working American roots musician, even an established local performer whose work appears on other artists' recordings - including a disc recently nominated for a Grammy.

That would be Healthy Food for Thought: Good Enough to Eat, a compilation for which Gleeson cowrote one song ("Mother Earth's Garden") and performs on another ("Garden Green"). The double disc includes contributions from Moby, Julian Lennon, and Camden's own Yocantalie Jackson, and is one of five "Best Spoken Word Album for Children" nominees.

Gleeson, a recently divorced father of two, is accustomed to multitasking, musically and otherwise: He teaches guitar part-time at Moorestown Friends, was one half of the bluesy Philly duo the Luck Brothers, and played lead guitar and keyboards with the pop-soul-disco hitmakers Sister Sledge.

"Yes, I can definitely play 'We Are Family,' " Gleeson, 54, says, referring to the group's immortal dance-floor anthem. "I never considered myself a disco sort of player. I don't know that I ever looked the part.

"But I toured with Sister Sledge for 15 years. It was exciting, and I felt honored that I was doing it. It was a great experience."

Via e-mail, lead singer Kathy Sledge calls Gleeson "an amazing musician and songwriter." I resist the urge to tell her how many thousands of times I danced to "We Are Family"; she goes on to praise Gleeson's gifts for "all genres of music."

That artistic eclecticism is rooted in Gleeson's childhood in Palmyra. At 6, he had his first piano teacher, and around seventh grade he started studying guitar with Bill Johnson, now deceased.

Soon Gleeson was playing bass guitar - everything from jazz to swing to folk songs - in Johnson's band, the Generation Gap. He knocked around in some rock bands during high school at Holy Cross in Delran; studied music at Rutgers-New Brunswick; and got into the Philly music scene of the late 1970s.

That's where he landed the Sister Sledge gig, which lasted from about 1980 through the mid-1990s. During and since, he's made music with and for other artists, including Kathy Sledge.