But it’s more complicated than that. No matter how Borders tried, it always felt somehow inauthentic to me. Truthfully, I never really liked the chain. Even though it stocked my books in-store far longer than Barnes & Noble did. Even though it introduced the concept of cafes in bookshops. Even though some of the earliest dates with my wife, Michelle, were spent at the local Borders. Wait, maybe I did like Borders. Yeah, it’s complicated.

I’ve had trouble explaining how I feel—so I made a video instead.

When Borders first started closing stores in February, 2011, I visited the Kips Bay location in New York City (fifth store in the video, around :38) to see if I could find some bargains. While I was there, this song came on the music system. I didn’t know the track, but the experience was almost as if the store itself was singing, eulogizing its past, wrestling with the knowledge that the end was near. It was a very weird moment—since I’d anthropomorphized a corporation for God’s sake—but on some level, I was moved. Accordingly, this video is an attempt to share the feeling I had that day.

Don’t get me wrong—the chain had been overpriced for years (everything was list price, always) and the Borders Card system never worked, no matter how many times I gave them my email. Also, we hear about independent bookshops closing all the time, and some of that was due to entities like Borders, shoving their way into every nook and cranny of our nation. Nonetheless, seeing the failure of a massive bookstore chain—one that had put so many local bookshops out of business—was even more sad in a way. For some communities, Borders was the only bookseller they had left, and its closing forced those customers to resort to the solitary, empty experience of buying books online—or worse, just not buying books at all.

On the other hand, I had to use an app on my phone to find out what the song I’d heard was, and then headed to the CD department to buy the album (Longwave’s 2003 opus, The Strangest Things—which is excellent, by the way). Borders didn’t carry it, but they had about 5,000 different John Mayer discs. I wound up buying the LP (vinyl!) via eBay and bought the individual song off iTunes for this video. Computerized commerce was my only recourse—that’s how the world works these days, and it ain’t gonna change back.

If there’s anything to take away from this then, it’s to support retailers you like that have communities built around their businesses—bookstores, CD shops, coffee houses, theaters, libraries, restaurants and so on. Don’t take them for granted; go to them. Use them. Enjoy them. You might think they’re too firmly established to vanish into thin air, but if you don’t visit them, they’ll evaporate into nothingness—just like Borders did.

"OK, I'll go out with you if you promise never to play The Pixies again. Deal?"

Vinyl records are suddenly trendy again, but what will it take for this brief moment to become a true movement?

Over the last few years, there’s been a growing interest in vinyl records—those big, black, round things that everybody over the age of 30 used to get their music on. Corresponding with this resurgence, there’s also been a rise in incredulous mainstream news articles covering the phenomenon, most of which can be summed up as “Look at these wacky, retro kids, buying LPs—whoda thunk it?”

It’s not just a vague impression that hipsters are buying vinyl, however; there are hard numbers to back the trend. According to The Economist, 2.8 million LPs were sold in the U.S. last year, and vinyl sales are up 39 percent so far over 2010. It’s the same story in the UK, as LP sales there shot up 55 percent in the first half of 2011, according to the Entertainment Retailers Association.

Admittedly, this is all a drop in the bucket. The RIAA pegged the sales of vinyl LPs and EPs at 1.3 percent of all music sold in 2010, and it’s not as if overall music sales are going up anymore (Oh wait; they are. According to Nielsen, they actually went up 1 percent this year…thanks to downloads).

Nonetheless, records have hit the sociological flashpoint and become, well, Trendy. In fact, so trendy that you can’t call them “records” or “LPs” or “those big, black, round things that everybody over the age of 30 used to get their music on.” That’s “Vinyl” to you, thank you very much.

Long Island Record Exchange

This moment has been a long time coming; John DeSimone, owner of Long Island Vinyl Exchange, told me this past spring how he’d been waiting years for a “Vinyl Revival,” he’d always known it was going to happen, and how he couldn’t wait to unpack the 100,000 albums he’d stored in a truck for years. As a retailer, he wasn’t excited to see an uptick; he was betting the store on it, getting ready to move to a larger location later this year that has already been decorated as the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti during remodeling.

But what will it take for this moment to become a movement? What will keep those hipsters buying vinyl three, five or 10 years from now? The key will be for retailers and the music industry to focus on the benefits of vinyl—and to make those benefits work for the consumer, creating an end-user experience that is better and more enjoyable.

• The Sound: Audiophiles have long maintained that vinyl sounds better than CDs (and MP3s, of course). Many insist it’s a better long-term storage medium for our musical heritage, too. At the least, there’s something to be said for listening to Boston’s debut album (AKA Boston’s Greatest Hits) on the medium it was created for.

• The Coolness Factor: The aforementioned Economist article makes an great point about the cultural cache that vinyl provides:

“People used to buy bootleg CDs and Japanese imports containing music that none of their friends could get hold of. Now that almost every track is available free on music-streaming services like Spotify or on a pirate website, music fans need something else to boast about. That limited-edition 12-inch in translucent blue vinyl will do nicely.”

• The Cost: You can download “More Than A Feeling” at iTunes for 99¢—or buy a used copy of the whole Boston album for $3 at your now-not-so-local record store (or 50¢ at the garage sale down the street). At a time where no one has spare money for entertainment—and hipsters never have money—it’s hard to argue with a bargain like that.

But all of this mainly focuses on old (i.e.: used) records. The music industry thrives on presenting new acts, and getting people to invest in new music on new vinyl by new artists is a different story.

Given the still tiny demand, new vinyl is pressed in limited runs, especially in the indie scene where pressings of 500 or 1,000 copies are commonplace. As a result, finding records in the real world is difficult. Only a handful of national retailers carry any vinyl, and they have extremely limited offerings that lean heavily on reissues (Best Buy stocks that Boston LP for $24.99; can you say ‘Bargain?’ Me neither). That means the only way to buy new artists’ LPs is either at a well-stocked indie record shop (good luck if you don’t live in a major city), the occasional concert merch table, or online mail order.

City and Colour's Little Hell

That last choice is the most common—and yet also the worst. First, there’s the twin problems of Wait and Weight. Consumers used to instant musical gratification suddenly have to wait 5-10 days for their package to arrive. Meanwhile, that package is gonna cost them, thanks to its weight. Today’s records, pressed on de rigueur 180 gram vinyl, are heavy, and often come in ornate packaging. If you buy them via mail order, you can spend upwards of $30 for one album between the price tag and shipping, as I did recently for City And Colour’s Little Hell (A great folk rock album, by the way).

Already, despite this being still early days for the Vinyl Revival, there’s a certain amount of gouging going on, too—seemingly every new LP that comes out automatically gets a gatefold sleeve, and many albums get split across four sides, all of which raises the price.

Such moves aren’t always necessary either; take that City And Colour album—clocking in at 47 minutes across four sides, it may improve the sound to provide so much real estate for grooves, but it smacks of just finding new ways to charge more. It’s not an especially user-friendly decision either: Having such short sides (one runs less than 9 minutes) is a nuisance. The album comes with a download code for high-end MP3s, but if a poor end-user experience nearly forces you to base listening choices on convenience instead of sound, then there’s no point in spending $30 on vinyl when Amazon will sell you the same album as MP3s for $7.99—and a quick, illicit-minded Google search will provide it for even less (as in “FREE”).

The Vinyl Revival has been a surprising but exciting turn of events, revealing that a new generation is willing to pay for music again, even if it’s for a fetish object like a vinyl LP. If this phenomenon is going to gain momentum and remain viable, however, the music industry is going to have to examine its pricing and distribution methods—the same two factors that aggravated its initial fall in the face of illegal downloading—and make sure it gets them right this time.

A few months later in 2010, the movie hit the festival circuit, and I heard through the grapevine that I made the final cut—pretty cool, since they shot more than 600 hours of interviews! That said, I didn’t know what parts of our Q&A made it in; when I was in the straight-to-video documentary Jedi Junkies, I appeared for a whopping 14 seconds, so for all I knew, this was going to be the same deal.

Having landed distribution, PvGL is now seeing a limited release in various major cities before hitting DVD sometime later this year. The first city to get the flick was New York, so after more than a year of suspense, I finally got to see the film and…it’s pretty good.

The director, Alexandre Philippe, told me initially that he wanted to make a film where he could theoretically sit on a couch next to Lucas and be able watch it with a clear conscience. To that extent, he gives the man plenty of credit, but he doesn’t pull punches either—it does have a lot of bashing (inevitable given the premise) but it’s fairly even-handed, covering a lot of ground adroitly. At 90 minutes, the film felt about 15 minutes too long, but it’s enjoyable all the same. My beloved Michelle, who could care less about Star Wars, was hooked early on (and not just ’cause I’m in it), so it’s safe to watch with your disinterested significant other. Fellow fans know—this aspect is very important.

While the film’s good, what’s even more surprising is that I’m pretty good, too. I usually hate myself on screen, but I appear in it a few times, speak reasonably intelligently and get a laugh or two, which is the best you can hope for in these circumstances. All in all, if you get a chance to check it out PvGL, whether on the silver screen or DVD, give it a try—and if you do, let me know what I said the first time I appear, because my beloved Michelle cheered so loudly that none of us in the theater could hear a word of it!

As a result, it was kind of a thrill to go behind-the-scenes of The Wall when it returned to the venue some 30 years later. While musically some of it is a drudge, visually the show was never less than spectacular due to the gorgeous staging. Writing the article was a bit of a trick though; the house sound engineer—the person mixing sound for the audience—was also the tour manager and didn’t have time or interest in being interviewed. Similarly, no one on the crew wanted to be photographed for the story, and during the coolest moment of the day (which kicks off the article), I didn’t dare take a shot or I probably would’ve been thrown out on my ear.

Despite all that, I had a lot of fun writing the story, which you can read HERE,and the tour is well worth seeing if you get the chance. In the meantime, here’s some extra photos that didn’t run in Pro Sound News.

Dozens of cardboard "bricks" wait before showtime in unused seats, hidden backstage by the giant scaffolding used by the crew to build The Wall. The bricks are seen sitting upside-down here, as the tabs used to align and fasten them together are pointing upwards.

One of the most surreal moments of the show includes a remote-controled flying pig. Really.

This shot gives a sense of the production's massive scale; it's BIG.

Hidden on the side of the stage is the mixing area of the monitor engineer, who mixes sound just for the musicians so they can hear themselves. Towards the end of the show, the band performs in front of The Wall while he's still behind it, so he watches the band via the video monitor on the right while he mixes.

At each venue, show schedules are slightly different, so updates are distributed to the crew daily.

Despite all the modern technology on-hand, all the vocal microphones are old-school Shure SM58s.

The Complete Road Crew

Road Crew started out as a daily web comic about wayward concert sound engineer Jim Soundman and his slovenly audio crew. When Kelly brought the series to a close after two years of misadventures, he converted the entire run of comic strips, formatted like what you’d find in a newspaper, into a dense graphic novel (i.e. now it looks like a 336-page comic book), and after many delays, it finally came out in the fall of 2010. Even though we’re talking about cartoons, the book isn’t meant for kids; if you venture over to his website, be ready for fairly R-rated material. At its heart though, Road Crew was sweet and sincere with genuinely likeable characters, and I was happy to write the Introduction (below).

•  •  •  •  •

The standard stereotype goes that concert engineers are idiots who push road cases around and occasionally turn the volume knob while quaffing gallons of beer and chasing every skirt in the crowd. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that Road Crew proves it’s not true.

That is, I’d like to say it, but the truth is Jim Soundman and his gang do their best to embrace classic Rock-n-Roll hedonism with every fiber of their being most every chance they get. It’s as if they were trying to tick off all the boxes on a mythical Roadie Cliché Checklist, but like most everything else they do, they fail because there’s one item destined to remain unmarked forever:

Despite repeated entanglements with Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, the Reaper, a visit to the infamous Crossroads and more, Jim Soundman has never sold his soul for Rock-n-Roll. For better or worse, he’s stuck with it and if anything, over the course of Road Crew, his simple character has grown to become one of the most soulful incarnations of Rock-n-Roll around.

Why? Because every day, Jim gets ground down by crap equipment, evil music biz interlopers, talentless musicians and an indifferent world. More often than not, he’s the only one in the hall who even cares how the band sounds, performing small miracles to make garbage groups sound better than they have any right to. What does he get for all his troubles? Not much. Jim’s personal life is a wreck and his professional life is a joke (well, it is a comic). Some people say their job will be the death of them; his already has been.

All that would make a lesser fictional construct throw in the towel, but not Jim Soundman. If Rock be the music of rebellion, then he is its very personification—after every defeat, rising up out of a pool of his own flop sweat where he drunkenly passed out the night before to once again don his crumpled devil horn shirt, curse his empty wallet and (ig)nobly man his post behind the mix console. I believe it was the noted physicists Twisted Sister who once sang “You can’t stop Rock-n-Roll,” and in truth, you can’t stop Jim either. Ergo, by those terms, without question, Jim is Rock-n-Roll.

And long live Rock-n-Roll.

–Clive Young, author, Crank It Up: Live Sound Secrets of the Top Tour Engineers

Linda Holmes of NPR called it “delightful,” while the must-read publishing blog GalleyCat called it “a loving parody” and Alan Sepinwall of the HitFix blog, What’s Alan Watching? tweeted “Love this Fountains of Wayne/Stieg Larsson mash-up.” Even Fountains of Wayne gave me a shout-out, showing the video on their website, which was both amazing and humbling.

All of that is pretty cool considering the video’s a hobby project that got out of control. Here’s the video:

I was driving home late one night in July from one of my library programs when Fountains of Wayne’s song, “Red Dragon Tattoo” from the classic 1999 album, Utopia Parkway, popped into my head. Since I had read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo recently, it didn’t take long before I shoved two Tattoos together and started rewriting the song to pass the time. When I got home, I tried singing a few funny lines to my wife. As you may have noticed from the video, I’m no Freddy Mercury; sung a cappella, the new words only garnered a raised eyebrow.

In the days that followed, however, the idea kept coming back; I’d see someone reading the book on the train and inevitably, the song would start playing in my head. I had to hear my parody song for real! Soon, I decided to use some audio software to remove the vocals from “Red Dragon Tattoo,” turning it into a karaoke track so I could finally sing my version to my extremely patient wife and show her how brilliant I was.

Um, yeah. So brilliant that I had somehow ignored the fact that there’s a lot more syllables in the phrase “Girl with the” than in the word “Red.” There was no way to make my lyrics fit with the real track; if I was ever going to hear them with the song, I’d have to re-record the tune—so I did.

I used Apple’s Garageband program to record my cheap-but-effective Xaviere XV-700 guitar; aged-but-awesome Ovation Elite acoustic; tiny Akai LPK25 MIDI keyboard; and for the solos, a vintage, circa-1984 Sequential Circuits Six-Trak synthesizer that gets pulled out of my attic once every two years. I even threw caution to the wind and recorded priceless memorabilia from the band Too Much Joy’s final gig: a kiddie tambourine with a sticker on it that reads “20 F—— Years.” Priceless I tell you.

I don’t play any of these instruments well, of course, but what I lack in ability, I make up for in blind—or in this case, deaf—enthusiasm. I figured it’d take an afternoon to hash it out.

After recording for a few weeks, I had put so much effort into what was supposed to be a quick, throwaway project that I had to share the result with the world, if only to rationalize to myself that I hadn’t completely wasted a month’s worth of precious, non-existent free time.

When I showed the final result to my wife, she laughed a lot and was impressed. I beamed. Kind words from NPR and GalleyCat since then have been wonderful, but for me, those laughs were Grammy and Oscar Awards rolled into one.

And now you’ve heard and seen it too—thank you and I hope you enjoyed it.

• • • • •

I recently got to hang out with Robbins Barstow, Jr., who made a Tarzan fan film when he was 16—in 1936! While I interviewed him via phone a few years ago for Homemade Hollywood, we never had an opportunity to meet in person; luckily, we stayed in touch, and on a recent trip through Connecticut, I finally got to stop in and meet the fan film pioneer in person.

Robbins has a slew of fun stories, only a few of which wound up in the book. In his chapter, you can find out about the Tarzan movie he made with his brothers way back when—and the sequel they made in 1974, when they were all in their 50s. During the years in between, the first film became something of a family treasure, brought out at holidays and parties to be shown amidst hoots and hollers, all the while narrated by Robbins’ sly, understated wit.

Visiting with Robbins and his wife, Meg, it was easy to see how they enjoy sharing a lifetime’s worth of amateur films with the world (you can check out 16 of their movies online at archive.org). One of them is about as famous as a home movie can get: Disneyland Dream, which was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in December, 2008. You can watch it online HERE and even buy it on Amazon HERE.

They screened the 30-minute flick for us—my restless 5-year-old, Ava, was entranced—and it’s special. The film recounts the true story of how in 1956, the Barstows won a Scotch Tape contest for an all-expenses-paid trip to the then brand-new Disneyland, following every step from flying over New York City enroute to California, to trying every ride in the park. It’s all told and shot with great humor—for instance, every member of the family comically faints on the front lawn when they learn they’ve won the contest. The opportunity to see Disneyland in its earliest incarnation, as well as 1950s Hollywood (including the famed concrete handprints) and the Universal Studios tour, is also a treat.

One of the most enchanting things about the movie, however, is that it has taken on a life of its own, continuing to resonate and give back to the Barstows more than half a century after it was made. For decades, Robbins showed it to friends and family, travel clubs, on local public access cable TV, and so on, and it was accepted to be preserved forever by the Library of Congress. But then the story gets more unusual; in 2009, he got an email from Steve Martin—yes, that Steve Martin—letting him know that Martin had seen the movie, and spotted himself in it as a pre-teen, selling guidebooks at the front gate. You can find out more about that story HERE.

Filmmaking is just one of Robbins’ many past-times, however, which include everything from saving the whales to science fiction. During our interview years ago, he asked me, “Say, have you ever heard of Star Trek?” Um, yes, yes I have. He then launched into a great story about how Catherine Hicks (the cetacean biologist from Star Trek IV, but best-known as the mom on 7th Heaven) wound up staying over in their guest room one night.

Meeting Robbins and Meg was a fun experience, and we were grateful for their kindness and hospitality. Over the last year, I’ve finally met a lot of the people I wrote about in the book, and chatting with Robbins proved once again that discovering these folks in person has been the most enjoyable and rewarding part of the whole process.

See, John is from Knoxville, TN, which means he drove a loooong way to get to the ‘burbs of New York City where I live. Luckily, I was just one stop on his whirlwind, self-appointed Northeast tour, which includes visits with Dan Poole (who once swung off a six-story building for his own Spider-Man movie), Adam Bertocci (fan filmmaker/author of the viral hit Two Gentlemen of Lebowski), James Cawley (head honcho of the mindboggling Star Trek Phase II series); Michael Wiese (producer of the legendary Hardware Wars); and others. And that’s just this journey—over the last few years, John’s interviewed everybody in the fan production community; take a look at Backyard Blockbusters‘ Facebook page and you’ll see what I mean.

If anyone is qualified to make a feature-length documentary about fan movies, it’s John. After all, this is a guy who won awards from the Lucasfilm Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge two years in a row. Then there’s the fact that he co-wrote/directed American Scary, a film about TV horror movie hosts that just won this year’s Rondo Award for Best Documentary. The guy knows what he’s doing, and he’s coming to the topic of fan films from the right place.

I had never met John before, despite the fact that we’ve traded emails since the late 90′s and I interviewed him for the book. When he turned up on the doorstep Friday night, weary from doing battle with the infamous Belt Parkway, we devoured a round of Thai food, then settled in for two hours of chat and shop talk. Over the course of the evening, we wound up exploring nothing less than the history, psychology and greater meaning—if such a thing is possible—of fan productions. We had a great time, and I can hardly wait to see the finished film; I suspect that our respective alliteratively titled projects will complement each other very well.

We did the interview with me simply sitting in front of a makeshift ‘green screen’ made out of construction paper. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a big budget production, but I’m all for scrappy independent efforts—after all, I wrote a whole book about ‘em.

Marc Edlitz

Marc peppered me with questions about my own interest in Star Wars and fan films in general, trying to figure out what would drive people to put so much effort into home movies based on someone else’s creative ideas. I don’t remember much of what we talked about now, but I know it was contentious at points—like the part where I suggested his documentary was in fact a fan film. That went over real big.

Overall though, we had a good time and Marc seemed like a pretty smart guy who had big dreams for his fledgling project. He wasn’t the only one thinking big; I mentioned at the end of the interview that I was thinking of writing a book on the history of fan films.

Time went on, I never heard from Marc again and eventually I forgot that I’d ever done the interview. A few years later, that fan film book I was dreaming about, Homemade Hollywood, came out, and now Marc’s movie is coming out, too. These days, the flick has a name—Jedi Junkies—and it’s premiering online May 20 at Dailymotion.com. As for me, that hour of questions boiled down to approximately 15 seconds of screen time where I define the term “fan film”—and that’s cool because I figured I was a shoo-in for the cutting room floor.

For now, it’s a free download, so check it out. If you’re a Star Wars fan, or just like gazing at Olivia Munn—a fellow talking head in the film—you’ll dig Jedi Junkies. Plus you’ll get to hear the mellow strains of my pals, Aerosith, the world’s only Star Wars death metal band. Entertainment doesn’t get any better than that, folks.

A phenomenally talented guy, Owsley recorded his 1999 solo debut over the course of a few years at home, playing most of the instruments himself. Released on Warner Brothers’ Giant Records during the label’s death-rattle phase, the self-titled album sold about 100,000, but wound up nominated for a “Best Engineered Album” Grammy award—not bad for a home recording done with gear that was perpetually breaking down.

More importantly, the debut album has come to be regarded as a stone-cold classic pop record–one of those joyful rarities that unloads one great, hook-filled song after another. Listening to it for the first time is a treat because you keep waiting for the first clunker to show up—can he really have this many good songs on here?—and the clunker never comes.

I got to interview Owsley in 2004 as he was promoting the much-delayed follow-up, The Hard Way, playing solo gigs in between tour legs with Amy Grant (he was her road guitarist for 16 years). Any music journalist will tell you, one of the perks of the gig is that occasionally you get to talk to your musical heroes: the people who made the stuff that inspired you so much that you had to tell the world about them–and thus became a music journalist. The downside, of course, is that a lot of heroes turn out to be…well, let’s settle for the term “jerks.” That was not the case with Owsley; the guy was as unassuming and friendly as he was talented.

The resulting article (reprinted below) turned out fairly antiseptic—his withering comments about Warner Brothers executives were far too profane, albeit hysterical, to print—but it seems only fitting to run it here in memoriam. A better way to pay tribute, of course, is to check out his albums, which highlight the musical joy he was so adept at creating and sharing.

From Pro Sound News (June, 2004)
Recording The Hard Way
by Clive Young

Lots of musicians daydream of self-recording an album in their home studio, and since they’re dreaming, the disc would of course be released by a major label to critical acclaim. Pop singer/songwriter Will Owsley, however, actually pulled off that stunt in the late Nineties with his self-titled Owsley debut album, which–going into daydream overdrive–wound up nominated for a “Best Engineered Album” Grammy as well.

Five years after those heady days, Owsley has now released his follow-up, The Hard Way, on upstart indie label Lakeview Entertainment. The disc has a decidedly heavier bent than his debut–part of why he’s no longer on that major label; after years of butting heads over whether he’d written The Big Hit Song yet, artist and record company mutually called it a day, and Owsley left with his tracks in tow. Now The Hard Way, released in February, is gathering steam and its lead single, “Be With You,” is garnering respectable airplay at AAA radio.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the album, however, is its cohesive sound, despite being recorded over the course of three years at different studios in a variety of recording formats. “I started out on 16 track 2-inch and did a lot of the basic tracks,” he recalled. “Then I made slave tapes, putting drums and bass down to two tracks of a MCI JH16 track 2 inch at 30 ips, since it would be easier for me to overdub at 30 getting in and out. I did that on about half the record and then the machines broke down.”

The result was that his ever-evolving studio suddenly began accumulating gear at a ever-quickening pace. First, Owsley’s tape machines were replaced with an Otari Radar II (“It’s incredible and it has never ever blinked”) and later, a Digidesign Pro Tools rig.

Then came a new console: “I was talking with Richard Dodd, who’s an awesome mixer, and I said, ‘Man, I just cannot find a console under 50 grand that is great.’ He goes, ‘Dude, the Soundcraft 1600 is the most unsung hero; I mixed Tom Petty’s ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ on one. It’s discreet, it’s old, brown and ugly, the EQ sounds like the Lord–and you can probably get one for $2,500.’ I found one up at Odyssey Pro Sound in New England, flew up, rented a van, loaded this big console in the back, and drove it back down to Tennessee; it was fun as hell.”

While much of the album was done in Owsley’s home studio, a move to a new house necessitated the creation of a new facility in his basement, which was designed by studio vet Chris Huston and built by Tri Star Contracting Company. Since creativity waits for no man, however, tracks were recorded in the meantime around Nashville, including “Rise,” which went from drums to mix in a hectic 24 hours at Emerald Tracking Room. “We never left until I was falling asleep at the console at 7 AM,” said Owsley with a chuckle. “There’s something really great about going all the way through a song in a period like that versus stretching it out over days. You don’t lose that center of gravity about what you’re going for.”

Other songs were recorded at Sound Kitchen, and also at The Bennett House in Franklin, TN (including the first single, “Be With You”), where Paul David Hager mixed the album.

Now with his home studio together, Owsley finds he’s writing and recording simultaneously. “When I’m in that moment, I just can’t help it,” he said. “When I’m writing, I’m sitting there thinking about what the kick drum pattern’s going to be. I think my whole life I’ve been an engineer/producer. I’ve done both and so now I don’t know how to make demos. I only know how to do the best I can. I can’t operate like, ‘OK, this is going to be a four-track bullshit recording.’ I need to make it sound great, because I want to blow people’s doors off. When I send songs to a record company, I’m not only selling my songs, I’m selling my engineering and my production–and in this day and age, you can’t send in crap.”

With his sparkling album now comprised of just a few of the 30-plus songs he recorded over three years, that philosophy has clearly paid off. For now, Owsley’s touring behind the CD is done between road trips playing guitar in Amy Grant’s band, but one suspects the hard way that he traveled along may be finally getting easier.