How was this produced and recorded? How long did the process take?
It would be nice to hear a little bit about what you were attempting to do with some of the songs. Maybe it’s because I’m a painter but I usually start by reading some sort of interview or artist statement in which they outline some specific goal. I refer back to that after viewing the work to see if they met their own goals in the way described.
I’m not a master musician but it sounds as if you drawn a lot of influence from other styles and genres of music. Was this intentional? Happy Accident?
This was produced and recorded in a garage on a multi-channel console and set of digital tape decks with effects. Most of the percussion came from drum machines. Different songs were recorded at different times — this occupied about two months but we weren’t at it anywhere close to full time. The final touch was mastering by compression in Audacity software, making the tracks hotter. It involved several electric guitars, a Dean bass, a Roland electronic piano, and a Roland Sound Canvas (that’s how we got the violin). Voice was not mine but was done on a Neumann microphone.
The concept of the album really didn’t gel until we were almost done. Everything fit at least vaguely under the rubric of “redneck” activities (”The Little Boy” might be stretching it, but I scripted a country-style script for a video we hope to make). The album itself can be seen on Digstation, CDbaby, and iTunes among other places, but I’m not trying to plug it here. I’m just trying to get an idea of who would like it the best. We haven’t had a huge amount of luck selling the 1500 copies we had pressed and would like to gain insight for a better focus.
Oh, and I partly or completely wrote the lyrics for most of the songs. A couple of them I also created the music for. This was actually an experimental work on my part — my pea brained idea of how I might create some credible sounding country songs. After hearing what played on the radio, I thought to myself gee, I think I could pen something at least as good, and would like to try it. On the way to realizing these songs with my buddy, I discovered that it actually isn’t all that hard to write decent songs. Getting the public’s following is a whole ‘nother matter and it takes an artist and visibility for the artist.