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Track listing:
1. Love Won’t Make It Right
2. Caroline
3. Undone
4. Love Me (And Lift Your Mask)
5. Daddy’s Little Girl
6. For a Little While Now
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BACK
STORY:
In May 2002, I hooked up with Jeff Sandberg, a Central Washington
University music major. One of my first solo gigs was at an after-hours
thing on the CWU campus in Ellensburg, so I enlisted Jeff and
another student, Heather Moser, to play with me. Jeff played sax
and congas; Heather sang. It wasn’t a horrible performance,
but without me, they may have sounded a lot better. The experience
made Jeff and I fast friends, and soon we were playing anywhere
I could get a gig in the Central Washington area.
For
the next 12 months, Jeff and I play at nearly every gig I booked.
He caught on real quick to what I was doing live and the vibe
I wanted to create. Our one and only mutual influence was the
Dave Matthews Band, so some of that tone and vibe filter in
through my own music. Jeff also became a close confidante and
a respected peer; he was one of the few people I’d listen
to when I sought advice about a song, or the way I was playing,
or the way a lyric should go. He also inspired me to quit being
so lazy, to stretch the comfortable boundaries of music I’d
created and try new things.
A few of
the “live” tunes we played – songs I’d
written but never recorded – were rewritten for dynamics
and tempo: During a set at Pearl’s on Pearl in Ellensburg,
we changed “Caroline” from a straight-forward DMB-rip
off to a suave jazz number, with Jeff on this old upright piano.
I doubt anyone noticed or cared, but for Jeff and I it was about
having fun with the music I’d written, seeing how we could
invert it and twist it around, seeing what improvements (and
there were a lot of them!) we could make.
The idea
for “Snapshot: An EP” came in early 2003, when we
agreed it would be fun to go into this studio in Cle Elum, Wash.,
and put a few songs “down on tape.” As fate would
have it, we played enough paying gigs before our April studio
session to cover the cost of the recording and the first printing.
We wanted to record a half-dozen songs for ourselves, for posterity’s
sake, as well as for our friends and family…
RECORDING
PROCESS: I tried and failed several times to get Jeff’s
sax to sound good on my studio machine; I guess I didn’t
have the right mic or didn’t know what I was doing. We
wound up at Cascade Recording in Cle Elum, Wash., and recorded
six songs with owner/engineer Alan Larsen.
Larsen’s
studio is tucked away in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains
in Western Washington and it’s a pretty cool set-up: wood
and fabric panels on the walls, natural light from a double-pane
sky light, direct line of sight from any recording room to the
engineer booth. He records almost everything into his computer
with this Mackie program, saves every track on swappable hard
drives and has just about every gadget and effect you can think
of at his fingertips. The outside of the facility is metal siding
and looks like a barn or hobbyist’s garage. It’s
amazing what comes out of there…
We
recorded all of the guitar parts first. Alan plugged my Epiphone
PR-E directly into his system, then did two additional cross
mics to yield three guitar tracks at once. I played through
each song with little trouble; I think all but one of the songs
on the CD includes the first take. (To be honest, almost all
of them are first takes because of time and prior rehearsal.)
After I was done, Jeff was set up in the main recording room
and I was put in a back solo booth so we could record vocals
and sax parts together. Again, most songs were finished in the
first take. Part of our fortune with not wasting time is that
we picked six songs we knew backwards and forwards. Even when
I screwed up the arrangement on “Love Me (And Lift Your
Mask)”, Jeff was able to go back and fix it, so the song
flows even better than it did before. After about three hours
of recording, we were able to mix three songs, then I went back
two weeks later and mixed the rest.
LYRICALLY
SPEAKING: I can hear my songwriting improving on this
CD. “Love Wont’ Make it Right” is the first
song I actually wrote with a specific theme or message in mind
from the first note. It took weeks to find the right words –
including a midnight drive home where
the complete chorus and bridge popped into my head – and
I’m proud of the fact that everything came together in
a simple thought: Sometimes love isn’t enough to right
our wrongs. The other songs still deal with relational redemption
and the promise of tomorrow. “Love Me (And Lift Your Mask)”
was originally the lines of a Dylan Thomas poem put to music,
but I could never get the meter of his work to even out. So
I essentially rewrote the poem using his imagery and even added
an homage to my favorite poet at the end: “I hear Dylan
Thomas in my dreams.”
FINAL THOUGHTS:
I love the collaboration between Jeff and I, both musically
and personally. He was the uncanny ability to fit his notes
right where they need to be, and there was little instruction
or discussion about what he was going to play during the songs.
He sounds a little too Kenny G on “Undone”, but
I think he makes up for it with his improvisational skills on
“For a Little While Now”. That last track is probably
my fave just because it summed up what we did over a 12-month
period: set the tone, said what we had to say and had fun with
the rest of the music. Every time I listen to this disc, I’ll
think of those times.
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