All Washed Up & La Bandida Pelirroja - 10 Years Since Recording Began
It has now been almost one entire decade since I huddled in a Mission District recording studio with two other very experienced musicians and one very experienced studio engineer to record live takes of songs that were born from several years of busking in the streets of Madrid, Spain. It was meant to be a raw, yet semi-produced album of songs that would signal the end of my years of busking. I needed to make a concise snapshot of the wild energy of street singing, and I had many new compositions to document that had been seriously road-tested for the occasion. I did last-minute preparations for the studio sessions by busking in the 24th St BART Station late at night. I had barely practiced with the band when the recording days came around.
I would eventually spend a couple of additional months with the studio engineer adding vocal parts and some piano, and then we brought in just a few other studio musicians to add some sparse layering to a few tracks. I never wanted it to be too lush. I wanted it to sound immediate, and I wanted it to have an almost “live” sound. I was looking for something like “garage folk”, but a more accurate description would be Lyrical Urban Folk Music. It needed to sound underground and from the city streets, and it also needed to sound eloquent and poetic. I think I was thinking of roses growing from between the concrete. I also had some other stream-of-consciousness “On The Road”-type literary references bouncing around in my brain, and I was trying to imagine what the feeling of living a life of pure improvisation might sound like as a collection of folk songs. I wanted the songs to feel grounded in a simple “street-level” musical accompaniment comprised of mostly acoustic instruments, but I wanted the lyrical aspect to feel wild and free with a surreal “head-in-the-clouds” poetic imagination guiding the narrative. I am not sure that the final result reached the height of my vision. However, I put all of my energy into making and then sharing and promoting the album. I did this in my own DIY fashion in the moment when streaming music was emerging as the dominant form of sharing music. I insisted on selling only CDs, and the momentum that brought me to create this album would fade swiftly after it was first published in January 2013. I tried to play some shows. I tried to do something to bring it to more people on my own, but all of the right pieces were not in place at the time for that to happen. I invested so much in the making and publishing of the album that I nearly lost my life.
What was originally one long album was converted into two separate shorter albums in the Fall of 2020. After a long, stubborn season of many years where I resisted the smartphone and the many other devices that new generations had already absorbed their lives into, I made the move to distribute my entire discography to streaming services during the COVID lockdown. My record label, Outsider’s Soirée, was born then, and now you can listen to All Washed Up and La Bandida Pelirroja anytime you want. A few special individuals might own the original 13 song CD, Land’s End Beach, but time will tell if that will actually become a valuable “out-of-print” collector’s item. I suppose if the two shorter streaming albums arrive to more people in the coming years, then that may eventually be the case. Well, anything could happen, but I am celebrating today the spark that brought me to document these songs with a small band in two days in the Summer of 2012. There was a lot of big dreaming, otherworldly faith, and a powerful sense of purpose that went into recording these songs, and I remember well the labor that the band and the engineer put into helping me to make the album a reality. I am grateful for what went down, and I will never forget the experience.
-Starlight*
June 20, 2022