Going It Alone

Over the last couple of years I’ve worked on a lot of different creative projects. I’ve done session work for other artists and producers, created tracks for live shows, produced music for tv, worked on a film score, and so much more, but I knew that my roots as singer/songwriter were never going to leave me alone. I had songs that I had written that meant a lot to me and songs that I wanted to write that were stirring just under the surface and I knew I had to get them out.

I started writing for this project at the beginning of 2023 and spent the year just setting aside blocks of time to write and ended up with between 50-60 songs by the end of the year. About 20 of those I thought would be great for the project I had in mind.

I started working on demos and narrowed those down to 14 tracks. Then I started making a playlist of songs the inspired me from a production standpoint. It was everything from Jason Isbell to Duran Duran, Kraftwerk to John Prine, The 1975 to Run-DMC. I was looking for anything that married the digital world and the analog world well and kept it’s integrity in tact as a piece of art.

I wanted this record to be part Americana/singer-songwriter and part electronica/synthwave and it just seemed really hard to accomplish that. Synthwave and electronic music has an other worldly nature to it and Americana is as real and blue-collar as it gets. Electricana if you will.

To try and marry those things seemed overwhelming. But I started to find threads of ideas and right before the Christmas holiday I put scratch tracks for 13 songs in Pro Tools sessions and decided I would listen to them over the break and formulate some angles and ideas and then start work in January of this year.

While juggling some other projects and gigs I got to work around the 2nd week of the year on the first track and man… that empty pro tools session can’t be intimidating. That blank canvas, that blank piece of paper… it’s a battle.

I had to figure out how to attack these songs in order to get started and with the amalgamation of production genres it took a bit to find my vantage point. But I started by exploring sounds from 808, 909, and 707 drum machines and finding kicks and snares that I really thought fit the song well and finger drumming the basic drum patterns. Then, I just started building.

One rule I had set in place in my mind early on was that I couldn’t do guitars until all the other instruments had been recorded.

I knew that as a guitarist, if I did guitars early on in the recording process I wouldn’t leave room for synths, arps, and textures that I really wanted to characterize the songs. So, I kept with that discipline throughout the recording of the music.

I would finger drum the basic pattern around the scratch vocal and scratch guitar. Then lay down a basic synth so I could get rid of the scratch guitar. Then I would build out the drums, then build out a few more keys tracks and synth bass. Then I would work on more complex keys and finish producing all the details of the drums before I went back and started on guitars.

After I finished all the songs in this way I went back through them and just clean things up, made the percussion feel more real, re-tracked a few things, added a few things, took away a few things, etc… and got ready for vocals which is were I am now.

I’m a few songs into tracking vocals and my plan is to go back through the songs and add a few more interesting bits, edit a little more and get it to mix by mid May. My friend, and incredible engineer, Ronny Cates is mixing the record and then we will send it to Abbey Road (yes, that Abbey Road) for mastering.

I’m hoping to have the first single out in August and the entire record out in October. I’m actually going to visit the vinyl plant that is doing the pressing tomorrow in Athens, GA with my friend, Jonathan Maloney, who is the art director and primary graphic designer for the record. I’m really excited about the project to say the least.

It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve absolutely enjoyed the process. This record is filled with songs I needed to write, things I’ve been through, things I’m going through, and things I’m hopeful for.

I don’t have plans to really be an “artist” in the traditional sense, but I love writing and sharing things so I’ll be playing a few songwriters festivals, and a rare gig here or there with friends when it makes sense. The real hope is that these songs will land on your favorite tv shows and films somewhere soon and that people will stream them, enjoy them, and buy them on vinyl as well.

I think these are some of the best songs I’ve ever created. I’m proud of them and I can’t wait to share them with the world.

More to come…