I’m excited, and kind of relieved to finally be able to share this album with you all. It’s been a really important project for me and it’s rekindled my love of composing and recording. This project came along when my relationship with music was pretty rough. To be honest, I was getting close to quitting music. I was unimpressed with my trumpeting, uninspired by what I’d recorded in the past, and I couldn’t really see the point of committing so much time into something that didn’t give back. Then, in the summer of 2020, on a whim I put my name into a draw for studio time at my friend Colin’s studio (shoutout to SSDP Studios) and low and behold I got picked! I arrived at his studio with no plans, no ideas, and no chops (I hadn’t been playing in months). Completely useless without any kind of vision, Colin set me up in a little room with a mic and an 8 track recorder and I spent the next week writing songs, layering horns, and recording keys and weird synths. It was amazing to be back in the studio and actually creating new ideas!
I finished my little demo residency with seven news songs and lots of inspiration and stoke. I used one of the tracks to get a little bit of funding from the Yukon demo grant fund and spent all winter recording more horns and keys with my computer’s built-in mic and garageband. By springtime, I was in the studio at Green Needle Records re-recording horns, and my friends Austin Tufts and Aidan Knight were helping me at Catalogue Studios recording drums. Many months of mixing and a little mastering later, “Dogs For Emma” was finally finished and ready for listening.
“Dogs For Emma” is the first time I’ve ever been truly happy with my own project and feels like the first step towards realizing the musical ideas that have been in my head for over a decade. I want to create music that’s driven by the melodies, by the sounds and by the vibes and not by some wanky eight minute jazz solo (I can’t do that stuff anyway). Touring, hanging out, and listening to people like Colin Sigor, The O’Darling, Aidan Knight, Nick Everett/Mauno, Hannah Epperson and Karkwa (to name a very very few) were pretty instrumental to how I want to make music and their influences fuel all my ideas. I also want to give some major shout outs to my partner Emma Dobson for everything she does, Jazz Yukon for their unending support, Austin Tufts for his enthusiasm, and Aidan Knight and Colin Nealis for their invaluable feedback and production help. These people are awesome.
Anyway….
“Dogs For Emma” is out now! Give it a listen if you want something a little different and mostly weird. I hope you like it because it’s the best I can do.
