I've just released a new album.
It's all acoustic, Country Blues covers, but that's just part of what makes it special.
In my first post here on substack, I talked a bit about my time in Denver, CO in January of 2023, and how it was my first encounter with the group of musicians who would become The Lucky Strokes. One thing that I didn’t cover in that post was how we had recorded all of the music you hear on our first record in that same week. I arrived at the studio with a batch of brand new songs and showed them to Eddie Roberts and The Galbraith Sisters and we laid them down right then while the songs themselves were still just barely born. That whole session happened over a span of two or three days.
On the second night, between full band recording sessions, and while the rest of the group was out and about participating in an jazz jam or something like that, Dylan Brown who had been our engineer on those sessions and myself sat down in the basement at the Color Red house with one thing on our minds -
lofi acoustic guitar/human voice sounds.
Dylan had this killer little acoustic guitar that he kept in the studio. I had been sitting down in the basement strumming it, tuning it down to Open D and playing a song or two, tuning it to Spanish and playing a song or two… Dylan pulled out this odd looking old announcer style microphone, like something you might have seen attached to a podium in your high school gymnasium for a graduation ceremony. He hooked it up to the tape machine and ran it through an insane amount of compression, and the result was a room sound that captured every breath, every little finger bump against the body of the acoustic guitar, but also made it all sound like it could be coming through a 50 gallon metal drum that you pulled out of a scrap pile in the woods. He asked me to start over with my process of tuning the guitar and playing a few songs, and I did, going through what essentially was my solo setlist for acoustic restaurant gigs at that time. We ended up staying up till 3 or 4 in the morning listening back to the nine songs that we had captured, and digging on the vintage sounds we were getting through Dylan’s mic rig and Color Red’s tape machine. I remember thinking, “Well, we can’t really show this to anyone else. One - because we weren’t really given permission to use this tape which is not cheap, and two - I am supposed to be saving my voice for cutting the vocals of the The Lucky Strokes stuff tomorrow.”
The next day, when I walked downstairs to start cutting those vocals, Dylan Brown and Eddie Roberts were sitting in the control room listening back to the songs we had laid down in secret the night before, and Eddie laughed at the notion that we might not have shown the session to anyone else. “How many albums are you going to make this week?,” I remember him joking. We moved on from the session and I didn’t think to much else about those recordings for a while, until Dylan sent them over to me a few months later. He had gone through them and cleaned them up a bit, refining the compression and EQ, and I realized that these songs might actually get to see the light of day, someday.
Well, today is that day. Portrait [South Mississippi] is live on all streaming platforms as of today, July 5th 2024. It is an homage to some of my favorite singers and songwriters, and it is a monument to the audio engineering talent of my friend Dylan Brown. The tracks are almost all done in one take, so the mistakes are in there side by side with the magic. If you like acoustic blues music, and frankly if you don’t I don’t know why you are reading this, then this album is for you.
For any audio nerds out there, here is the microphone we used..
The album cover I put together for this release features a collection of old photographs that I took from my Great Grandmother’s (top left) collection after she passed away. I chose the pictures based on how that made me feel, and what memories about my raising they brought to mind. That’s me in the red ball cap in the bottom right hand corner, shown with my sister and brother hunting Easter eggs with my Great Grandfather, doing a weird little dance and presumably having a great time.
I’m having a great time now too, making music I enjoy and seeing the world from my own perspective.
The Lucky Strokes summer tour starts this weekend at High Sierra Music Festival in Quincy, CA, and I am very much looking forward to it.
Love y’all ❤️