With the Rain

A new collection of songs.

Not instrumentals or soundtracks or improvs or whatever… Songs.

It’s been a while. It’s been a long while.

That gulf in time has made this a strange little collection, honestly. It is really two groups of songs.

The first three songs are quite old and have been kicking around in my practice routine for, well, years. Two of them for something like seven or eight years, at least. They have become very well plotted out as solo acoustic and vocal songs over the years.

The second group, the last three and a half songs (counting the 30 second prelude as a bit of a half a song), is new. Within the past year or so. They were part of a collection based around one story and originally planned to be an electric, band based album called Mosby’s Lament. However, a couple of folk-y acoustic songs started creeping in (as they do) and, eventually, took over (as they will – for me, at least). Only one of the electric based tunes escaped: Mosby’s Fate, the instrumental that was going to open the album. These three acoustic songs are still thematically connected, but are now more abstractly so. I prefer that, really.

A lot of these songs have been demoed in various arrangements, from solo to rock band, over the past couple of years. Working on the Remasters project, I felt that I wanted to do something with a fuller arrangement than my recent(ish) acoustic albums just to keep the recordings a little more interesting for me. It turned out a bit fuller than I initially planned, but in a very organic way. Really, for me, the recording process is a bit like playing live – it involves a lot of improvisation and searching and finally lands in a recorded moment. The song lives on from there to be played (or recorded) however it comes out the next time. The recording isn’t a definitive version, it’s just a performance. Hopefully, one of many. So maybe next time will be simpler arrangements – or maybe with a rock band. Who knows?

I have been listening to a lot of radio of late (now that we are somewhere with a radio station worth listening to), and find I’m really not a fan of the current state of production. Even primarily acoustic music is so compressed and resampled that it feels like so many recordings could have been done with a software synth and some (very well recorded) acoustic guitar loops. And, honestly, they probably almost were by the time the producer was done. I wanted something more raw than that, part out of necessity (I live in a noisy neighborhood in a noisy city in a very noisy building, so pristine just wasn’t going to happen), and part out of desire. I decided early on to not use a standard drum kit and played nothing to a click track. Everything started as basically a live acoustic version of the song (with a bit of a “what you got is what you get” attitude to the sound of the take) and was built on from there. It was recorded digital (on an iPad, no less), but I wanted a bit of an analog mindset to it.

So, this is With the Rain, recorded in 2023 in Shockoe Bottom, Richmond, Virginia.