Today the 2nd album by my band Western Blot, Materialistic, came out on all of the usual digital music services: Bandcamp, iTunes/Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Amazon, and so on. I've been trickling songs from this record out on singles and an EP over the past year, but I really had a vision for how these songs fit together as a whole, and I'm really excited for people to hear that.

I had been recording at Mobtown Studios in Baltimore for almost a decade when my friend Mat Leffler-Schulman told me they'd be moving the studio out of the building in Charles Village. And I had a record in my head, that I hadn't really written or demoed yet, that I really wanted to make there, so I booked some of the last available sessions at the studio, and wrote and recorded pretty much the whole thing in a couple months.

Ishai Barnoy, who is playing guitar in the new Western Blot live lineup, came by and played on several tracks. I got help on the vocals from lots of Baltimore vocalists who make their own excellent music: Kathleen Wilson (of Thee Lexington Arrows), Koye Berry, Lizzy Greif, Andy Shankman (whose band Jumpcuts also released a single today), Brooks Long (of Brooks Long & The Mad Dog No Good), and Scott Siskind (of Vinny Vegas). And as with my other recent releases, Materialistic was mastered by Dan Coutant and engineered by Robbie Liberati, with cover design by HPJ Art. I'm really grateful to all of those people because Western Blot started as a 'solo project' and I still write everything, play most of the instruments, and sing several songs, but I've come to really enjoy the collaborative aspect of it, and feel like every single thing that someone else contributed to the record made it better than what I would've ended up with on my own. 

This entry was posted on Friday, March 15, 2019 at 6:10 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.