Bringing Back the Mists of Time

After a year of work, The album, Winter, is finished.

The album has been something of a labor of love even though it took me 35 years to get it done. That, of course, is misleading: it took me 34 years to start.

Which isn't technically accurate either.

After PearceArrow, and Broken Hearts and the Fabulous Perch, I wrote two albums worth of music, which became Desperate Mothers, and Winter. Having worked with Brian Waters, who was a good friend, and who had produced PearceArrow, and Broken Hearts, I thought we would get together to record these songs, but it never happened.
Brian has his own projects and was trying to find work as a full time recording engineer; I was getting into my own DIY production and was more demanding of what I wanted, and the people I had played with before had other projects and bands as well, or had moved to more music-centric locations like LA, Austin, or Nashville. Denver wasn't thought of as a hopping hotbed of music, though there were many talented performers at that time, such as Jill Sobule and Bruce Odland.

When I wrote the songs, I had just started using my Tascam 244 4-track cassette recorder and Winter was the first time I put together a true demo, with drums and bass to go along with the guitars and vocals. But I didn't have decent outboard gear and used a Fender amp to record with as it had reverb. And it sounds exactly as you might imagine: good enough to play for others, but certainly not for release.
As I got better mics and gear, I went back and recorded the songs of Desperate Mothers and continued on with new music, such as Ice Flows, Life Without Chickens, and Apologia.
Winter got left behind, and remained, in some ways forgotten.

Part of the problem was that in the mid-80's, I didn't have the studio to record them as I heard them in my head. The Winter songs were more Jazz based and I wanted them to be more lush; more like Steely Dan records, which had inspired the songs at the time they were written. And as time passed, I focused on more of a lean sound for the new songs I was writing.

Winter, was just an old cassette of songs at the bottom of the box of old cassette demos I would every blue moon take out and play.

So what happened?

Last year, after I finished Whispers (From a Forgotten Memory), I thought it might be time to go back to the Winter songs. I had 24 tracks to work with and real drums and keyboards, and most importantly, I could do all the harmony and backing vocals I couldn't do with  the 4-track. It took a while with all the other projects and new music I was working on, but I kept at it and now have a recorded version of Winter that I think is very good and that I want to release.

That will be in June 2019.

In the meantime, I'll be featuring the songs each week at mrprimitivemusic.com.

©2019 David William Pearce