Stories For Monday
It’s finally here. Well, almost.
I suppose I consider today to be the eve of “Stories For Monday,” since it comes out tomorrow at midnight. A lot of you have already heard the album via Pandora (thank you for listening), and the feedback has been absolutely incredible. Seriously, hearing you guys say things like, “this is your best album yet,” makes me so happy that we’re still doing this 9 years later.
It is innately human to look back on where we’ve come from when we reach certain milestones in our lives. This morning, I had a flashback. It was 2002, I was at Desert Ridge mall in Phoenix, Arizona, I was 13 again, and I was listening to punk records at the listening station inside of Tower Records. I did this almost every Friday night when I was a kid, it was my favorite thing to do.
The albums I discovered at that record store in Arizona changed my life. I went from listening to music, to learning how to play music. I went from loving songs, to learning how to write songs. I went from buying albums, to learning how to record albums.
I’ve experienced so many incredible moments as a musician, but on the eve of the release of “Stories For Monday,” one moment in particular, stands out. I was 15 and my brother, Jess, and I were trying to record a bunch of the songs we’d been writing over the past year or so. We looked up studio time, and found that it was insanely expensive, so, we looked at other options. I had a friend who had an old Tascam 4-track home recorder, so I said, “lets just record ourselves.”
My dad helped us research how we could get the best bang for our buck, and soon enough, we were the proud owners of some $100 microphones and a Korg 16-track. HOLY SHIT!!! 16 TRACKS?!?! What are we gonna do with all those tracks?!?! The sky was the limit, and so began my obsession with recording music.
Over time, the 16 track turned into GarageBand, and GarageBand turned into Pro Tools. I spent countless hours obsessing over guitar tones, drums sounds, and mixes. I’d learn something new, and quickly move on to the next, never being satisfied with where I was, but in a good way, in a, “I want to be better,” kind of way. Over the years, I got better, songs started sounding presentable, and I started teaching my brother the things I had learned.
Flash forward to fall of 2015. A year had passed since I moved to Los Angeles, my brother and I had been working almost every day recording music for other artists/TV and film pitches, and we had gotten pretty good. A funny thing happened on this particular September afternoon, we once again found ourselves saying, “lets just record ourselves.”
It was this sense of confidence in ourselves that made “Stories For Monday” what it is. It’s what makes this album, above any of our other albums, a true representation of what The Summer Set sounds like. We recorded drums in the living room, we tracked vocals in the closet, we mixed the album in Johns bedroom! We made this record the same way we did when we were kids (only it sounds better).
I think that’s what you have to do sometimes, you have to take it back to how it all began. You have to take it back to when you were a kid walking through a record store on a Friday night, eyes wide, hoping that someday, the record you recorded, would be there.
Now, this record is there.
(almost)
