Six years ago, I wrote 10 songs that felt like an album. But for some reason, I couldn’t get the arrangements and instrumentation to sound as cohesive as I wanted.
I tried different styles – one particular song went from a slow blues shuffle, to reggae, to klezmer, to a weird art-rock vein, to hard rock, to a mid-tempo blues-rock thing! I got really frustrated and ditched the whole project. I wrote and recorded a new album (The Scars That I’ve Earned), mostly to clear the cobwebs from my brain.
Around that time, I started listening to a lot of Stax/Volt stuff – Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Sam & Dave, etc. And LOVING it. Those artists started to influence how I was shaping my writing, so I went back and rerecorded all ten with more of that rhythm section in mind. It worked! I definitely don't sound like them, but the slight shift in that direction was all the album needed.
A year of rearranging, rerecording, adding horn sections, and rewriting some parts, I finally walked out of the mastering studio on Tuesday night with ‘Gravedigging For Two’ on a USB key in my pocket. Walking home slowly, smoking a cigar, I realized that there’s a weight off my chest. It’s DONE! I actually feel like a part of my life has been completed.
Now I’ve got to find a project for the winter (and hopefully not the next six of them).