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americana - four years

Brian Ales

Label: Self Produced
Released: 2024
Duration: 00:29:06
Views: 81

Tracks

Sara Smile; Nights On Broadway; Telephone Line; Ricki Don't Lose That Number; Hello It's Me; Fly Like An Eagle; Desperado

Personnel

Album Description

...an album of heavily reimagined (but I think respectful) cover versions of unapologetically mainstream US radio hits from between 1974 and 1977. In that sense, it represents another take on "americana" - but I would consider the project primarily ‘world-music-adjacent’ and informed by improvisation, pop production, and electronica touches.

Aside from crossing multiple genres, another idea central to the project was to use vocals only sparingly – this was done in an effort to compensate for the intrinsically higher ‘emotional impact’ of a human voice relative to that of a musical instrument (in other words, to ‘equalize’ the overall importance of the vocals and the instrumentation), but it also has the effect of maximizing the impact of the vocals when they do appear (only later did I come across other artists such as Khruangbin approaching vocals as another instrument in a similar way).

Also of note...

I had worked with all the other musicians decades ago, so this project represents a real ‘circling back’ for me as my first project since coming back to music

Although highly produced, everything is 'real' (no sampling or loops)
Anything that sounds like a guitar is actually me on baritone ukulele, my solution for avoiding the emotional baggage of being a 'guitar player' again:)
It was all recorded remotely (mostly during Covid), either by exchanging files or by accessing musicians’ home computers over the internet and collaborating live

Album uploaded by Brian Ales