| Other Side of Town |
About the Record After recording albums through high school and parts of college, and then reinventing my music by learning the guitar, I finally recorded an album that I didn't mind letting other people hear. I began performing these songs in 2001, and began recording the album with under the title "Contain" in 2002 in a small home studio I built out of recycled sound equipment and an iMac. My old friend Danny Maland returned to Salt Lake City later that year and we decided it was time to record this one the right way, so we scrapped everything I had done (except the drum loop to "Lost My Wings"), I wrote some new songs and scrapped some older ones, and we started fresh with new musicians in 2003. As production was wrapping up in December of that year, I decided to propose to my girlfriend, who was (and is) my biggest fan. What's a musician to do? Propose in front of 100 people at a CD release party on Valentine's Day. Looking back, I wish I had sung her a song I had written, but instead settled to sing a U2 song. The result would have been the same either way. We were married later that year. As the first official album of my career, I brought back many old tunes from my high school and early college writing days, including "Lost My Wings" and "Crush My Bones." In fact, many of the songs were written for a piano while I was in college, and reinvented on the guitar. It was a "coming of age" album for me, as I didn't really settle on a genre, I just recorded a bunch of songs that didn't really sound like each other. During the production, I emailed a few select cuts to a friend who also writes songs, and he replied with, "are you going to settle with one genre," to which I replied, "no." |