WILBURLAND

Hello everyone. Noah and I spent last week at Electric Wilburland, a recording studio just south of Ithaca, working on our new album. Here's a few pics...
The session went really well. We worked for four and a half days (Wednesday we clocked 10.5 hours) and made it through 10 out of the roughly 14 tracks we hope to include on the album. Our engineer was Will Russell. I first met Will when I was playing with the vintage/retro bluegrass group The Lonesome Road Ramblers (I was probably thirteen at the time). When I was fourteen I played on John Rossbach's album From the Mountains to the Mills which was also recorded at Wilburland but both Driftage and Dancing Again were done at Chuck Eller's Studio in Charlotte, Vermont. I love working with different studios; different engineers and recording spaces. You learn so much more that way. Anyway, here's some info about the new album. It's all original material and Noah and I play all the instruments as usual. Two things are obviously different about the instrumentation on the new album: 1) for the first time we're both doing some singing and 2) there's very little percussion. With the accompaniment, we wanted the focus to be more guitar and mandolin oriented to keep it distinct from the piano and percussion that we use so much in Great Bear. There's still plenty of fiddles, banjo, bass, bouzouki, banjo uke and a two part piece written for a mandolin quartet: two mandolins, mandola and mandocello. We also worked hard at getting good tones out of the instruments so I think it'll turn out pretty decent once it's done. I'm happy anyway. The tentative name of the album is None So Lovely although that could still change. I'll let you know how things go in December.