Album Foreward

Dylan -

The story of this album begins with me in Moncton at the beginning of October 2023. I was sleeping on the couch of my friend and our soon-to-be producer Louis Marc-Vatour. I was there for a couple days on my way through the Maritimes on my annual east coast tour, where he invited me to stay with him and see his home studio. Little did I know, the centerpiece of Louis’ studio was one of the only working analog 16 track tape machines in Eastern Canada. He made the offer to me, “hey man, if you ever want to make your way back here, I would be happy to record whatever you want”. I’d never recorded to tape…This is an old-school approach, with analog warmth that lends itself to acoustic instruments, peeled back performances working with only 16 tracks, and crystal clear rawness.

“...I think I want to record with my dad here.” The next day, I pitched the idea to dad. He was all in. We began pre-production, and planning our road trip in 5 months to New Brunswick. A round trip of 3800km.

March 17th 2024, we began our drive, in my dad’s Jeep, “Hoot Gibson”. The first obstacle arrived when Doug didn’t have his hearing-aid charger when we arrived in Montreal. Thankfully, the next day we arranged to have his audiologist’s office in Toronto ship us a charger to the Mocton address. A few hours after that was resolved, we had a tire nearly fly off our car, which left us stranded overnight in Riviere-Du-Loup. It cost us a day of recording time where dad had no hearing support…We like to think though, a good road trip isn’t complete without its fair share of obstacles, it’s part of what makes the story. After all, an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. Not to mention that where a day of travel is lost, a beautiful scenic drive through the center of New Brunswick is afforded. Some of the pictures of that unforgettable drive can be seen here.

We knew when we finally arrived safely in Moncton that the recording experience was going to be a special one…What we didn’t know was that the intense, and fully immersive recording experience, would look so much like every behind the scenes documentary that I’ve watched from my favourite bands. We slept in the control room, woke up, had a coffee, got to work for 12-14 hours, and winded down on the couch with Doug & Louis exchanging life stories until the wee hours of the morning. This was our daily cycle for 9 days, where we left the house precisely two times: Once to buy groceries and again to play a gig in the town of Hampton at Gridiron Brewing.

Louis had asked us to buy a reel of tape when I was still in Toronto. It let us record for 34 minutes on 16 tracks (you can think about this as 34x16). Well, we ended up using, very literally, every bit of space that was across the 16 channels of that tape. It was just the way the 9 songs ended up working out. It was a coincidence that Louis said he’d never seen happen. It was to the point that, when we recorded “What a Wonderful World” (the last song sequentially on the tape), I would hold the last chord of the song, wait for the chord to fade out, and the tape would actually come off the machine from running out of space. Louis would have to manually set the tape back on the machine again. We did this 3 times for 3 instruments. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t have planned if you tried, and it contributed to the magic of what we created together.

The project came down to the wire. Our final recording session finished at 4am, and we needed to leave at 1pm the next day to make it to a gig at Oak Tree Pub in Perth-Andover. Louis didn’t sleep that night. As we stayed up all night transfering the tape recordings into digital format, Doug tapped out at 7am, and myself at 8:30am. When I woke up 4 hours later, sitting beside my pillow, there was a hard drive with the master digitized tracks, like a gift from the production tooth-fairy. I learned Louis was up until 11:30am making sure that we left with what we needed. I grabbed the hard drive, and a half-hour later, we began our journey home. We had done it.

As we drove home in Hoot Gibson, for what would become Hoot’s final trip, we listened to the rough mixes Louis sent us home with. We reflected on the whole experience, and the emotional highs and lows. Moments spent crying from laughter, and moments that broke us down mentally. Recording an album this way, to tape, was equally grueling and rewarding. Much like life, you don’t get unlimited attempts, just the chance to put your heart into what you do, and hopefully, the trust in yourself to take the leap and just hit that record button. On this website, we hope to let you in on some of what that was like, the stories behind the songs, and give further context to the record.

And what we learned from this experience; the struggles, uncertainty, joy, laughter, determination, patience, teamwork - all captured in a time capsule of music - was that:

The process is the result.