RECITAL album 10-year-anniversary

Ten years ago this week I began recording what would become my third solo album, Recital. It was the end a hugely prolific time for me as a songwriter and I had piles of 4-track demos that were candidates for re-recording. I had just moved to Chicago. My long-time musical collaborator David Casimir joined me in my 1991 Mazda Protege (the car that inspired a few songs on the album) and we journeyed up through Milwaukee, across Wisconsin, over the Mississippi River at LaCrosse, across Southern Minnesota, and down into the lakes region of Iowa to record at This Here Studio (pictured here) with engineer Richard Bruxvoort Colligan.
At the time, it was the most hi-tech recording experience I had had. 16 tracks on an ADAT machine! Drummer Lowell Michelson met us at the studio for those first sessions, as did keyboardist Joel Setterholm. Lowell had a brand new Isuzu Trooper, and while driving to dinner one night we hit and killed a deer on the road, trashing his brand new truck. Not a happy moment. But in general, we all had a blast and made some fine music. I would return to the studio alone in January 1997 to finish vocals and work on mixdown, but most of the album was knocked out during that freezing week in December ten years ago. A few tracks hold up very well to this day, in particular, "Janesville," "Nothing Old Nothing New," and "Tell Me Where You Want To Go."
The Recital album was released in the Spring of 1997 and it was the project that introduced me to the music scene in my new hometown of Chicago. The songs served me very well in those days...I had just become a full-time touring musician and I was playing coffeehouses, small clubs, and weird gigs all over the country. The musical workhorses from the record were "Only If," "Meeting Nixon," and "Tape." An excellent rhythm section played with me back in the late-90s (thanks Benji Derrick and Andy Deitrich!) and we even tackled some of the weirder tunes on the record like "Worse For You" and "When Rising From The Bed of Death." After pushing this album really hard for three years it sold out sometime around 2000 or 2001, and I chose not to manufacture any more CDs (I had shifted into a whole different kind of music career thanks to my 2000 album Sound Theology). The album went out-of-print and that was that.
In honor of the 10-year-anniversary of the Recital album, I'm very pleased to release an exclusive remix of the album's title track. The song "Recital" never connected to audiences on the CD, or in the rare occasions when I'd perform it in concert, but it always had a special place in my heart...the lyrics are a true story from my early days of dating Dawn, and I get a kick out of the guitar riff, bass line, and guitar solo, which were highly influenced by Liz Phair's arrangements on her Exile in Guyville album. Thanks to modern remixing technology, I was able to address some timing problems and groove issues in my original guitar parts that dragged down the original version of the song, so now "Recital" rocks tighter and cooler than ever before. Listen to the "Recital" 10 year anniversary remix here and let me know what you think!