Even as this fundraising campaign begins, a lot of has been going on behind the scenes. This past July after working on some new songs, I perused through a massive backlog of voice memos from the past decade or so, flagging unreleased material worth focusing on. Some songs were done, some required some edits, some were simply one solid verse or a chorus and some vague ideas. Realizing I had more than enough to start setting the wheels in motion for a new album, I reached out to Chris Hawthorn about what making an album would look like when he is now in a different city. We came up with a game plan - we could do some editing and brainstorming remotely, though much would need to be done in-person. We put a week down on the calendar at the end of February for me to head down to Philly to get some work in his soon-to-be-built new studio.

I set to work finishing and editing the songs and whittling down the list of which ones to record over the course of August and by September met with Chris over Zoom again. I had put together some playlists of songs I'd like the album to sound like. My last album sounds like the bands I love - Matchbox Twenty, Gin Blossoms, etc. The only issue is that the albums we managed to sound like were from 20 years ago. I've gotten some critique about that, but at the same time, don't love a lot of modern pop music. So the idea was to still follow the style of bands I love, but with an ear to the music they've been making more recently. We looked at Matchbox Twenty's new album Where The Light Goes. We looked at NEEDTOBREATHE's Out of Body. We looked at several others in that vein from the last five years. 

With my plans of having a bigger sound on this album, we agreed that the best course of action was to get session musicians together in the studio to flesh out ideas in-person rather than having them do their own work separately. Wanting to make the best use of my time while in Philly, we decided to have me record the basic acoustic tracks and guide vocals ahead of time in Vermont, so that we can do a bit of brainstorming ahead of time and hit the ground running with the session guys right away when I get to Philly. While Chris looks for the right guys to play on the album, at his suggestion I recorded these basic tracks with Jeremy Mendicino at Lane Gibson Studio in Charlotte across four four-hour session in October and November. Demos in hand, I'm ready to roll when February comes around.