Homebody by Danny Fisher-Lochhead

I had written all the music for this record, settled on a name, and booked the studio all before the pandemic arrived in 2020. I then ended up sitting with it, making demos for songs, and taking the time to clarify the intention of the project for the next year until I could get into the studio in June of 2021. The title of the record ended up taking on some different associations than I had initially intended as our collective isolation wore on through that first year of lockdown. Also, the moment that we recorded it -- a moment when society was "opening up again" and we thought the pandemic year had passed -- inevitably left its mark on some of the feelings in the music. But otherwise, this music was not initially a "pandemic project".

This band first got together a few years earlier to workshop some new material and play a few shows in Downeast Maine, where I live. The music from that residency was more focused on live performance and improvisation than this collection of songs; for this record, counterpoint ended up being an unexpected jumping-off point for the music -- that is, two or three voices moving together. Most of the harmonies and structure of the songs themselves were extracted from these two or three part conversations.

From the beginning, this record felt like a hybrid of approaches -- acoustic/electric, live/edited, organized/improvisational. Ross's decision to play all the songs on electric bass helped to shape the palette and overall feel of the record. Max's personal drum language, including his sensory percussion setup, was also particularly appealing to me in arriving at the mixture of feelings I was looking for.

Throughout the extra year of preparation before the recording session, Ari and I worked together to fine-tune the recording process, as well as talk about the editing and mixing work we would do after the recording session. From his work on his own records as well as his work as a producer, I knew the sound world that Ari was drawn to, and I was excited to include these kinds of sonically expansive and rich textures into this music.

In some ways this is a very simple record, one that bears a similar shape to when it was first conceived. It also feels modest, in that its moments of ecstatic flight emerge sparingly, and are usually embedded in otherwise organized musical textures. But it also feels honest to me in where it sits emotionally and stylistically. My hope is that the sound world, the harmonies, melodies, textures, and forms feel both familiar and unusual -- that they bear the marks of their evolution and the processes that shaped them, but that they also feel unexpected and alive, fed by some unknown source.

DFL 10/06/2022

The music found here is from a number of different projects I've lead over the years. The different formats represent both the turns of my creative interests as well as the particular circumstances of my life.

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