I’ve never really spent time writing with any other songwriters before, or writing under any kind of deadline. But in early 2015 myself and fellow songwriters Jenny Stockdale and Cass Barber decided to get together for a kind of winter stay-cation/writer’s retreat. 

The task was simple, but ambitious. Each of us had 3 weeks to come up with a new song, from scratch, that we would bring to a camp in the southern Adirondack mountains where we’re workshop and record an EP within 48 hours. 

None of us had any idea what we’d come up with, and Jenny was fresh off the release of her album ‘Fingers Crossed.’ I don’t think I’d really written a complete song since finishing The Flood a few years earlier, and I was worried the the songwriting well may have run dry.

None of us had any idea what we’d come up with, and Jenny was fresh off the release of her album ‘Fingers Crossed.’ I don’t think I’d really written a complete song since finishing The Flood a few years earlier, and I was worried the the songwriting well may have run dry. Regardless of what came out of the weekend, at a minimum I’d get to spend some quality time with some of my favorite people on the planet. 

I wanted to try my hand at writing more of a ‘story song’ or something that just painted a picture of a particular place and time – a moment. I was also deep into The Lone Bellow’s album ‘Then Came the Morning’ which provided a lot of inspiration for this track. Their voices come together in harmony like few bands and that half-step scoop that is heard on several tracks on that record was something I was hell bent on stealing borrowing.

We all arrived, and set up a makeshift studio in the living room of the cabin, learned each other’s tunes and got right to work tracking. We had great support from Greg and Christine Evans who joined us for the weekend and lent their talents to the tracks.

Besides sharing good meals and good wines our hope was to take the work from the weekend sessions and put them out at some point as “The Tuba-Low-Down” but as the months passed we never quite got around to mixing, mastering and putting together a proper release.

Even though I had written the bones of the tune before we got together it was quite a different experience to be able to just work on music for almost 3 full days and nights straight. There weren’t any obligations or distractions, even though we were under a strict completion deadline things didn’t feel super rushed. 

I truly loved how “By The Time…” turned out though. It’s a snapshot of a a Saturday night in a small city. Watching the bars close and their patrons emptying onto the streets – some newly in love, some in the middle of a fight, and the rest heading to greasy spoons and midnight diners to make future plans drawn on diner napkins…plans that are not likely to actually happen. From my experience playing the bar scene for years, closing-time can be a very strange time. 

As this new project started coming together I tried to re-record most of the tracks for “By The Time” while still keeping some of the live takes from the original sessions. I was able to salvage Greg’s drumming and Jenny and Christine’s beautiful harmonies. So I re-recorded the rest of the instrumentation to those tracks at home, 4 years later to fill out the sound and finish painting the picture.