The songs on “Seven Cities” draw inspiration from a number of different sources.  “Jennifer” and “The Blacksmith Shop” are autobiographical, “Hill Country Rain” is historical, and the others are inspired by my travels or by tales told out of school from people with whom I’ve worked in the indie music and film business over the years.  The songs were written primarily during the 2007-2008 timeframe, when I was first starting to perform as a solo artist, in addition to playing and recording with Akina Adderley & the Vintage Playboys (“Dead to the World”, in fact, originated as an AAVP song.)  Having devoted much of my musical energy to that band over the course of two years, it wasn’t until I left the band in late 2008 and subsequently lost my day job in early 2009 that the idea for a solo album really cemented itself.  In early 2009, while still living off of a severance package, I volunteered (in the same sense that Ben Rogers volunteered to whitewash the fence) as the pianist, pit boss, and arranger for the UT School of Law’s annual follies pageant.  Given that the orchestra consisted of whatever volunteers we could get from the law school, I was tasked with arranging a variety of show tunes for one flute, one cello, two guitars, a bass, a drummer, and myself.  To make matters worse, the drummer broke his arm three weeks prior to the show, so I ended up having to computerize most of the drum and brass parts for the Broadway numbers using Logic Pro.  For some of the other numbers, I had to play the drum parts live by triggering samples from my keyboard.

I hadn’t really done much work with MIDI sequencing since high school and college, but this crash course in electronic drums actually proved to be a blessing in disguise.  I had always wanted to do an album that sounded like it was made in the late 70’s/early 80’s and transferred to digital in the early 90’s.  1993, in particular, was the year that, after a 5-year obsession with New Wave, I started to discover 70’s rock and to fall in love with the earlier works of artists like Dire Straits and Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac.  In early 2009, I didn’t know very many Austin-based drummers, and I wasn’t sure whether the ones I did know could pull off that kind of intricate-yet-understated Mick Fleetwood/Pick Withers/Jeff Porcaro sort of thing.  Not that I claim to be a drummer by any means, much less a good one, but having gained confidence in my ability to create at least a passable rhythm track using my keyboard, I figured what the hell.  Over the last half of 2009, “The Way We Started”, “Dead to the World”, “The American Dream”, “Jennifer”, and “The Blacksmith Shop” took shape in this way, with me first laying down the piano part to either a click track or a drum loop, then laying down the final drum tracks by triggering samples from my keyboard in real time.  I had intended to do this with “One-Way Line” as well, but I got used to the temporary drum loops I was using and never bothered to record over them.

I knew, however, that two of the songs were not going to fly without a real band.  Fortunately, in January of 2010, I met that band.  I had been working off and on with bassist and songwriter Pat Harris since 2007, when he sat in with a Latin jazz combo with whom I was playing at the time.  Pat was good friends with bluegrass singer Anna Mitchell.  The two of them had worked together back in Michigan, and Anna had recorded some of Pat’s songs on her first album.  He brought her down to do a taping of “The Infynit Hour” on the Austin public access channel and invited me to sit in on keys, with Aaron Goldfarb (then a law student) on guitar and Graeme Francis (a percussion instructor at UT) on drums.  Building upon the success of that performance with “The Uninvited Guests”, I hired the band to lay down “Atlanta” and “Hill Country Rain” during the week of SxSW at The Congress House Studio, the studio at which Akina and the Vintage Playboys had recorded our album two years prior.

In the ensuing months, I brought Pat and Aaron into my home studio (aptly dubbed “Spare Oom”, a reference to “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”) to lay down bass and guitar tracks on the rest of the album.  The day before Aaron was scheduled to record, I accidentally plugged the FireWire cable into my Mackie Onyx mixer backwards and completely smoked its FireWire interface.  It nearly nuked my hard drive in the process.  Fortunately, I was able to recover the hard drive and bring up an MBox 2 Pro that I had just purchased.  An MBox, or other DigiDesign hardware, is required when using Pro Tools 8, which is why I had purchased it.  However, the MBox is a less-than-ideal solution for Logic, owing mainly to DigiDesign’s flaky CoreAudio drivers.  Regardless, I had to use it for all of the remaining work on the album, because I didn’t have the $500 in the music till to replace the Onyx FireWire card (it still hasn’t been replaced, as I write this.)

I laugh now when I think back to the many times that a friend or colleague would ask me “how’s the album coming”, and even as early as 2009, I always seemed to think I was “about 80% done.”  At some point during the summer of 2010, I started to realize how unrealistic it was going to be to produce a 10-song album myself, particularly when one of the songs (“Hill Country Rain”) was 7 minutes long and another (an epic two-parter called “Calgary”) was 9 minutes long.  Thus, “Allegheny Sunrise” and “Calgary” were unceremoniously cut and replaced with acoustic mixes of “Jennifer” and “One-Way Line.”  Those two songs would have made the album too long for vinyl anyhow, and had they been included, the album would have actually been about nine cities instead of seven.

By September of 2010, the instrument tracks on everything but “Atlanta” and “Hill Country Rain” had largely taken shape, and I once again naively asserted that I was about 80% done– not realizing that, when recording and producing an album, the instruments are the tip of the iceberg, and the vocals are the rest.  Recording vocals proved to be a “learning experience” (translation: a royal pain in the @$$), because in a large sense, I was trying to teach myself vocal recording from both the vocalist’s and the engineer’s point of view.  One of the things I discovered was that, as a singer, you can get away with a lot of stuff live that you can’t get away with on tape, and I discovered that my songs were actually really hard for me to sing in the studio.  I had already determined that the original key of “The Way We Started” was too low, so I moved it from C to D prior to recording the guitars and bass (fortunately, since I had tracked all of the piano parts using MIDI, doing this was a simple matter of transposing the MIDI data and re-recording it through my Nord.)  However, it wasn’t until I had banged my head against the wall over the course of two days trying to track vocals on “Jennifer” that I realized I needed to bump that song up a whole step as well.  Unfortunately, at that point, the guitars and bass had already been recorded, so I had to use the Elastic Time feature in Pro Tools to transpose them.  Fortunately, Pro Tools does a good job of this, and in the places where you can still hear the artifacts, they sound almost like analog tape distortion.

I personally found vocal recording and producing to be the most tedious and least enjoyable part of the whole process.  I was trying my best not to use pitch correction, so I would record a fairly insane number of takes and go through them with a fine-toothed comb, taking the best pieces of each one.  If I didn’t get what I wanted, on some occasions I would end up recording even more takes of a particular phrase.  I think some of the phrases ended up being recorded 25 or 30 times.  If I wasn’t so fully invested– or perhaps “obsessed” is a better word– at that point, it would’ve been really easy to scrap the whole project or to do like Carlos Santana did and hire other singers.  One valuable lesson that I took away from this:  pitch correction software is often overused and misused, but if used properly and sparingly, it can make the producer’s job tremendously easier without detracting in any way from the track.  By the time I got around to recording and producing the last few vocal tracks (bearing in mind that the album was not recorded in order), I had figured out that it was a lot better to pick the take that had the best “feel” and correct the bad notes rather than to judge the takes purely on intonation.

Another not insignificant reason why the album took so long to produce was simply lack of money.  Working as a contractor for my day job, I was and am living somewhat hand-to-mouth, so I was trying to finance the album from other music endeavors.  Reserving a studio and an engineer for a day is usually in the neighborhood of $500, so I was really trying to do as much as I possibly could myself.  Fortunately, in early 2010, I fell into a gig as the keyboardist for Flounders Without Eyes, a successful jam band in the Austin area, so all of the money I made performing with them was funneled into production of “Seven Cities”.  Additionally, their rhythm guitarist and erstwhile producer, Mike Morgan, owns a studio in Dripping Springs (The Zone) that records a veritable who’s who of acoustic, Americana, and Texas country acts.  As I started becoming more and more of a fixture with Flounders, Mike brought me in to record piano tracks on his solo album, in exchange for future help with mine.

At some point during 2011/early 2012, I got really distracted with the notion of trying to mix and master the record myself, which in retrospect is about the stupidest idea I’ve ever had.  It was partly born out of the desire to keep everything in Logic Pro rather than going to the trouble of bouncing all of the tracks into Pro Tools and re-creating all of the volume and effects automation.  I learned some useful techniques by playing around with mixing & mastering in Logic, but ultimately it delayed the release by at least 3 months.  Ultimately, I just had to bite the bullet and spend the many hours necessary to recreate the tracks in Pro Tools.

As early 2012 rolled around, I had mostly finished all of my vocals– except for the 11-verse elephant in the living room known as “Hill Country Rain”– and had brought Akina in to record the backing vox on “Dead to the World.”  (Since she had formerly performed that song, I was used to hearing the chorus up an octave, and it just didn’t sound right without that part.)  I had worked out backing vocal arrangements for “Jennifer”, “One-Way Line”, “The Blacksmith Shop”, and “Atlanta” and was looking for someone who could do a Fleetwood Mac sort of thing.  Mike knew just the lady for the job:  Andrea Whaley, who had just finished recording backing vocals on Mike’s solo album.  Since I had everything in Pro Tools at this point, we brought Andrea into The Zone in the summer of 2012 to lay down the backing vocals, and I recorded the main vocal for “Hill Country Rain” at the same time.  I was somehow able to do that song with only 5 takes– I guess I was getting better at recording vocals.

At this point, I probably was really 80% done, but there was still a lot of production work left, and I had long since stopped talking about how far along the album was.  As my friend Pedro pointed out to me, sometimes talking too much about a project makes the project real in your mind, and thus, on some level, your mind doesn’t really feel any urgency to finish it.  The other thing I learned is that releasing “sneak previews” of the tracks is even worse than talking too much about the project.  Not only did it waste time by forcing me to temporarily perfect an unfinished product, but it also made the album feel even more real and complete, which made it even more difficult for me to accept how much work there was left to do.  I still had to tame the instruments on “Atlanta” and “Hill Country Rain”, and making real drums sound good is a lot harder than making electronic drums sound good.  Mike saved my bacon by EQ’ing the drums enough that I could work with the tracks, and he also showed me some basic techniques for producing them.  Through the process of bringing in the tracks from Logic, I already knew a bit about Pro Tools, but now I had to spend numerous hours learning it in earnest so I could comp and produce Andrea’s backing vocals as well as the instrument tracks on “Atlanta” and “Hill Country Rain.”  Bear in mind that, while I was spending probably 8-10 hours a week (on average) working on the album, I was also still actively playing with Flounders Without Eyes and holding down a job as a contractor to pay my rent.

Toward the end of 2012, I was starting to finalize production on the songs, but “Atlanta” and “The American Dream” really just needed something more.  Mike came to my rescue yet again, hooking me up with none other than Grammy-winning steel guitar player Lloyd Maines.  Production finally wrapped on March 4 of 2013, and as soon as I let go of the reins, things started to happen very quickly.  Within 3 weeks, the album had been mixed by Pat Manske at The Zone.  Over the course of two days, he took the mish-mash of layered tracks from my home studio and full band tracks from Congress House and somehow managed to build them into a coherent sound.

I was going to have Pat master it as well, but he left on tour in early April (in addition to being the engineer at The Zone, he’s also the drummer for the Flatlanders), and I really wanted to have the album online before Old Settler’s Music Festival.  Thus, I decided to bring it into Terra Nova, Austin’s premier mastering studio.  I had never worked with Nick Landis before, but as soon as we started talking, I knew I had found a kindred spirit.  He suggested foregoing the use of “brick wall” limiters and mastering the album as if it were a direct transfer from analog.  This gave it exactly that 1993 classic rock CD sound I was looking for, and it had the added advantage of allowing the vinyl and CD masters to be identical, which saved time and money (“Seven Cities” is vinyl-ready, if and when I raise enough money to do a pressing.)  “Brick wall” limiters basically shape the sound so that all of the peaks in volume are cut off, which allows the mastering engineer to raise the overall loudness level of the track.  This makes the track sound better on cheap speakers, cell phones, and earbuds, but since it also eliminates much of the “dynamic range” (the distinction between the loud and soft parts of the track), it can make the song sound flat and emotionless.  Like pitch correction, “brick wall” limiters have become overused in recent years, and critics of the practice have come to refer to their overuse as the “Loudness War.”

Nick is not only a fellow dynamic range fan, but he is also a member of the Pleasurize Music Foundation, so he was able to certify “Seven Cities” using their official tools.  The final master of “Seven Cities” received a rating of DR12 (12 dB between the peak and RMS signal strength, for the engineers in the audience), which gives it the same dynamic range as the original CD versions of Steely Dan’s “Can’t Buy a Thrill” (1985), Bruce Hornsby’s “Scenes From the Southside” (1988), Dire Straits’ “On Every Street” (1991), and Bruce Springsteen’s “Human Touch” (1992), all of which were albums that heavily influenced me.

Well, anyway, that’s the story.  I don’t claim that “Seven Cities” is Grammy material, but I’m proud of how it turned out, and I hope you enjoy it as well.  I doubt that there will ever be another album like it, unless someone else comes along who is as crazy as I am.  In the future, if any album I make contains more than just me and a piano, I’m hiring a producer.

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