Prompted by a question in next week’s episode of Dat Fury Radio, I went back and reminded myself of the production timeline of my current massive project, “Jam My Wave / Don’t Jam My Wave / Jam Those Squares.” As I’ve been mentioning in passing for probably more than two years, “Jam My Wave” is my current full-production, rock songs, one man band project. I typically only have physical space to work on one live instrument project at a time (and within that, usually only one instrument at a time!).
Following the release of “Fight Songs” in November 2022, in late ’22 or very early ’23 I decided to commit to doing a big guitar album. (Before researching this I had thought there was a year where I wasn’t working on a guitar album, but it turned out there was no break at all, or a couple of months at most. Time continues to be weird!) I thought I had enough song demos collected to make it work, and I wanted to do something with huge, rich, bi-amped, detailed-sounding electric guitars (kind of as a contrast with or next step from the bass-focused and Motown-inspired sound of “Fight Songs”). The imaginary mood board included bands like Spoon, Smashing Pumpkins, and Tom Petty. I had one specific riff I kept playing over and over that I was absolutely sure I wanted to include, working title “Mid Phase,” that will be the first track of the whole project.
Drew recently released an excellent Night Mode solo album, “Mystic Places.” Check it out below. Here’s what he has to say about it:
Hello. Light a candle. Drink a potion. Close your eyes and see. Mystic Places is a soundtrack for watching the sun go down on a humid summer evening, dense as the warm air full of fireflies, and long enough to take you into the dark of the night. It is for conjuring good spirits. It was born in the purest moments of experimentation and naive impulse, as if the synthesizers and sequencers were ouija boards guiding my hand to a destination I didn’t know existed. It was carefully edited and mixed for long-playing cohesion, blending synth explorations with field recordings, singing bowls, and a 7 year old girl’s recorder. Put on the headphones and relax, or crank up your stereo and see who else shows up to listen.
This album is free, with beautiful cover art by my friend, Ethan Jones. I asked him to recreate the cover of a book that fascinated me as a child. I couldn’t charge anyone for this music, because I feel like it was just given to me to hold onto, temporarily.
