released December 17, 2022

Earthlings Who Aided My Quest

Fruit of Knowledge
Drums performed by Colin Oakley at Healer DIY in Indianapolis, IN. June 3, 2020.

Colin is a drummer for tons of bands in Indianapolis and he helps run Healer DIY, an immersive performance space that I worked at and held a brief residency at pre-COVID. He’s one of my besties!

Grains in the Hourglass
Primary tracking of drums, guitar, bass, and lead vox engineered by Jared O Brien at Georgina Joshi Studio on IU campus, January 2020.

I met him through my friends at The Blunderbuss Cabinet, a house performance space in Bloomington that does awesome variety shows. I told him that I had this song that was my baby, my true work of art that I wanted to be sure I gave it appropriate treatment. So he helped me book a session at a top of the line studio at the college in Bloomington with a very tasty overhead reverb chamber. You can hear it on the live drumkit that lore has it used to belong to Questlove.

Grains in the Hourglass Trombone performed by Shane Perryman at the home of Kimberly Walsh in Atlanta, GA. November 10, 2020.

Shane joined my old live band by literally jumping on stage with his horn during a show and we were like “there’s a gig tomorrow come through.” He played w us on the Adult Swim Bloodfeast session we did. He is a multi-instrumentalist who plays bass and keys. He’s got the touch, check his stuff out.

Cosmic Kamikaze

Trombone performed by Shane Perryman and Flute performed by Carolyn Reis.

Both tracked at my home in West End Atlanta, December 3, 2017. These horn sessions were actually some of the first on this whole record. Shane and Carolyn were both players in my live band at this time, Carolyn actually played on In The Tides of Time. They are both amazing people and incredible musicians that made this thang sound sexy!

Drums performed by Colin Oakley at Healer DIY in Indianapolis, May 25, 2020

Mixed by Tomas Uribe at Stanwood Studios.

Tommy is one of my favorite people I’ve ever met, a wise audio sage. First time we worked together I think was at this music festival called Seeds of Sound. He ran sound and recorded all the live bands all at once and I had mad respect for that kind of hustle. And he did it so calmly too! He’s a great musician and audio engineer, check him out.

Sex Addict
Featuring DrÍ on vocals, recorded March 21, 2019

DrÍ and I are old friends, we used to play a lot of shows together with her band Partials, and they actually helped be beef up some of the synth tones on some of my unreleased material. When she laid these vocals down in the studio we knew we had magic on our hands, like that little whistle she dropped at 4:10. Nobody saw that coming. She injected the whole track with immeasurable spirit and I am greatful to her for that.

Engineered and Mixed by Kenny Muto at Tomuto Sounds.

Kenny is one of the first people in this world that really believed in me as a musician and in a sense took me under his wing. He used to tour all over with a band back in the day and so he had more professional experience than me as a young twenty something writing songs out in the sprawl. He taught me a LOT about how to sing into a microphone, how to manage recording sessions and time to get the most out of your efforts. He recorded my first band’s EP. He gave me the space to learn how to perform in a studio environment when I otherwise would not have had access to one. So Kenny if you read this, know that I am greatful for all the guidance you’ve given me throughout the years, including the coproduction and mixing you did for this track.

Lies
All instruments performed, engineered and mixed by Josie Loner at her home studio in Indiana May 2020

O, Misery!
Special thanks to Colin Oakley for helping me acquire the church space to record the reverb live.
September 9, 2020. We recorded this in like three hours. We set up a close mic and two room mics in the church and by the time we were all routed then we just had to run it. One lead line take and three harmonies real real fast.

Be Free
All instruments performed, engineered and mixed by Josie Loner. We recorded those drums at Healer though and Colin helped!

Agoraphilia
Strings engineered and performed by Annie Leeth of Maze Studios in Atlanta. She is a talented producer, string player and songwriter that I highly recommend checking out. As you can hear from this track she elevated it to a whole new tier with those strings. Made my little love song a real smacker.

Ten Years In, Ten Years Out
Engineered by Geoff Duncanson at his studio in Yonkers, NY.

This was a really interesting session. We had a long convo about the industry’s tendency to overproduce before we recorded this with no click. We hung a ribbon up and did a vox/gtr track solo and then I tracked the bass and drums and some of the noisey electric guitar stuff all in one fast session. Then we added some subway sounds I had recorded on my phone.

I later added a lot of the supplementary backing vox and electric guitar, then I processed a lot of those reversed audio samples at the end through distortion units. Hopefully it doesn’t sound overproduced haha!

Anyway my other tracks relied heavily on the computer to keep everything together so it was refreshing to be allowed to just perform this one without a click so thank you Geoff for letting me express myself naturally.

All songs were mastered by wizard Jesse Mangum at The Glow Studios in Athens, GA

Special Thanks to Michael Tamlas for providing a preamp and compressor chain to boost my tracking capabilities