my album is going to see Chicago before I do!
Today we cleaned out our ears and brains and are giving the fully mixed album one last once over before we send it off to Carl Saff in Chicago for mastering. Some of you may know Carl by some of his recent work. He’s the mind responsible for mastering the albums of a few local artists here in DFDub. Notably: Nervous Curtains, The Beaten Sea, Vanessa Peters, Sleep Whale, Shiny around the edges, The Southern Sea, The Cutoff, Faris Nourallah, and a handful more. It’s good news as it puts me one MAJOR step closer to having a release show in August.
Just to give you an idea of how much I think you will enjoy this show, let me break down to you how the band is shaping up so far because this will be the biggest group of musicians I have ever had the privilege of playing with and I am extremely excited about it:
There will, of course, be me on piano. Shawn Spurrier on full drum kit, Benj Pocta (the beaten sea) playing bass, Becki Howard (The Crash that took me, Sara Jaffe) playing violin, Cynthia Hart playing Cello, Ryan Becker (RTB2) playing guitar, Jamie Wilson (The Beaten Sea) playing Banjo, Eli Browning (Dirty Birds, Republic of Texas) vocals and organ, and Kelsey Bowman (The Fox and the Bird) vocals.
All I really have left to add is a pedal steel player (if you know anyone, lemme know…). But this pretty much represents the record quite accurately. In addition to simply wanting an amazing performance to kick off the life of “Devil’s Nest”, I would really like for all of these talented musicians to have a chance to play these songs together in one room. We spent 5 amazing months in studio tracking this record and it would be so unfair to have never played a live version front to back. Not to mention the amount of high-five-ing that is bound to happen afterwards.
Anyway, I guess you should probably just keep the whole month of August free because I wouldn’t want you to miss it. And with ‘Devil’s Nest’ heading to Chicago to get the final glistening touches, you really wouldn’t want to waste any time getting your eager little hands on it because, y’all, it is so much better than I anticipated. And I can’t wait for you to hear it.

