Walk a Mile and The London Games
At the beginning of July, Stacey Haber of the Music Firm UK reached out to me to find out if I’d be willing to write and record a song for a social awareness campaign launching in conjunction with the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The campaign is called “Walk a Mile,” and draws its name […]
The Morning Breaks: My Life in Music
I just released a new video from our album The Ghost of John Henry, for the song “The Morning Breaks.” It goes like this:[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOx2HokCCwg]This an intensely personal video for me, and I have to be honest it feels a little weird putting it out into the world. The earliest footage in here dates back […]
Obsolete Technology Will Demand a Reckoning: The Ghost of John Henry
Our new album, The Ghost of John Henry, is available today. The folk tale about a railroad worker who raced a steam drill has stuck with me since I was a little kid, and so in a lot of ways it feels like I’ve been leading up to this record my whole life. That makes […]
Quick Album Update: The Ghost of John Henry
It’s a very exciting time for me, since the new album will be out on Tuesday and we’ll be playing our CD release show a week from tonight. We’re taking digital pre-orders here and physical CD orders here. It’s hard to quantify how much different this feels than when the first album came out in […]
House of the Rising Sun
We headed into the studio with ten songs to record for our next album, “The Ghost of John Henry,” but at the last minute, I decided to add an 11th to the schedule (we had to go up to 11, after all…). In a lot of ways, recording that last song — “House of the […]
In the Studio, Final Weekend – Video Blog
We wrapped all of the recording for the new album, “The Ghost of John Henry” this weekend with our final cello, guitar, and vocal sessions, in addition to getting some miscellaneous percussion tracks. Percussion “instruments” on this record will include chains, old cast iron jail keys, artillery shells, homemade stomp box, a “thunder tube” (not […]
In the Studio, Week 1 – Video Blog
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6eMNjh7HDc] I took a stab at a video blog, and I’d love to hear what you think. Here’s a three-minute peek behind the scenes at our first sessions in the studio to work on the new record. As always, for more about the band, free downloads, other videos, etc., visit www.scifiromance.net.
The Studio Awaits
Tomorrow morning we start work on our new album “The Ghost of John Henry” at JaronSound Studios. We’ve got ten songs to tackle in order to tell the story of the album, and we might try to bang out a couple of one-offs or would-be B-sides if there’s the opportunity. My plan is to try […]
The New Album is Written
I finished writing the new album tonight, which will in all likelihood be called “The Ghost of John Henry.” If you are not familiar with the legend of John Henry, it goes like this, more or less:In the 1870s, as technology was rapidly advancing and railroads were linking the United States in a way that […]
Playing Live
The past six weeks have been full of live performances. I was tallying it up today, and I think I’ve played somewhere every week for the last six, from a pair of shows with the expanding band lineup, to a few solo acoustic sets, and the odd open mic here and there. It occurred to […]