Dear Friends,
In November 2019 I started booking shows for a cross-country tour that I wanted to do the following summer. The idea was to drive across Canada in my tent trailer, stopping for sets along the way and sleeping in driveways and WalMart parking lots in between. By the start of 2020, I was decently prepared for the trip. I had 50 shows booked for the summer and I was getting excited to take off and get started.
By mid-March, every one of those shows was cancelled.
The world shut down with the pandemic and the tour was off. I now found myself stuck at my mother’s house in Hortonville, Nova Scotia with little to do. But I didn’t mope around too long. I decided to switch gears and start a new project. To fill the newfound time, I wrote a collection of “quarantine originals,” coming up with a new song every day for 11 days. On day 3 of the quarantine originals stretch, I wrote the first version of a song called “Caroline” and recorded a video with my friends Taylor McKnight, Sarah Surette, Ted Morris and Scott McKnight. Some of the other “quarantine originals” were keepers too. Some...not so much. But overall I was happy with them. At the very least they’d given me something to do during those first days when the world had shut down. And now I had a solid collection of songs I could record at some point. But that project didn’t last long. And with little money and no shows on the horizon, I decided to fly back to Ontario at the end of March. Now that touring was off the table, I wanted to make the most of my new free time. I’d spend the summer working construction with my brother-in-law, saving up money until I
had enough to get back to Nova Scotia and record an album.
Early on in my time there, I settled on the name for the record I was going to make: August, I’m Yours. It came from a track I’d written years ago -- one I’d always wanted to record, but could never find a spot for on any of my projects. I figured it’d be a good fit now. By coincidence, I worked it out that August would be the month I’d have enough saved to get back east and get to work on the album. While I waited for that month to come, I passed the time fixing roofs and hammering away in the hot sun, all the while itching to get back to the Maritimes
to start recording -- and hopefully salvage a bit of my summer too.
As predicted, when August came around I’d saved all I needed, so I flew back to Nova Scotia and went straight into quarantine. Locked away for two weeks, I had time to write a few new songs and record the demos for the album. By September I was in the studio with Ryan Roberts, whom I’d asked to be my producer on the project. We talked out some of the details of recording and went over the themes for the album. We decided we wanted to build it around two main ingredients: drums and bass. Ryan’s home studio didn’t have the capacity to record the sound we wanted for the drums so we drove to New Brunswick to record them at a studio in Memramcook that belonged to Ryan’s friend, Danny Bourgeois. We also took my best friend Taylor McKnight along with us to play drums for the album. Organizing the trip was a bit touch and go with travel restrictions, but we wound up getting in and out of the province to get the drums recorded just before the Atlantic Bubble “burst”. It was on that trip that we began recording “Caroline.” To start, Taylor came up with a very simple kick and snare beat that we ultimately built the rest of the track around. Ryan and I loved that beat. It had that easy, driving rhythm of someone strutting along, like the man in the song on that first lyric: “Walkin’ down the street to see my Caroline.”
With the drums down, we came back to Nova Scotia and brought the track to bassist Mike MacDougall, who’s well known in a lot of circles as the bassist for the early 2000’s electronica/jam group, “The Jimmy Swift Band”. He’d built a beautiful custom studio in Halifax, and Ryan and I drove back and forth from the Valley over 3 days to record the bass for the album there. “Caroline” was the first track we brought to him. We told him we wanted something modern and different for the track. He came up with a really cool sliding part to contrast Taylor’s simple drum beat, and we loved it. From there, I went back with Ryan to his studio in Kentville to record the rest of the song. The vocals took some time. I think I sang over 10 takes of “Caroline” to get one we liked. I just couldn’t get the right tone. During one session, I tried
to relax myself before the take by drinking a bottle of wine Ryan’s girlfriend had on hand. It really seemed to help. I felt like I nailed it. Then I listened back with Ryan the next day we both hated it.
After all those takes, it was actually one I recorded outside Ryan’s studio, in my room in Halifax, that made the cut. We did the rest of the mixing and recording in Ryan’s basement through the winter. The heat wasn’t working down there and it was absolutely freezing. We had blankets, gloves, toques and jackets on so we could keep working and
we’d break all the time to go upstairs and warm up by the wood-stove.
In the stretches where we could stand the cold, we went to work making the final changes to “Caroline.” Partway through the mix, after a tough debate, we decided to ditch the original guitar riff. We didn’t like how it interacted with the drums and bass -- which were our favourite parts of the song -- so we changed the picking to strumming. Then Ryan wrote a part for the piano on a Wurlitzerstyle keyboard As soon as I heard it I knew I wanted to finish the song with it, so we changed the ending too. (Taylor didn’t record the drums to this version so you can hear him hit the cymbal where the song originally ends part-way through
the section with the solo piano -- a happy accident that I think worked out well). A few final additions followed -- a baby grand piano, some female harmonies and group vocals, a synth -- and we were done.
This is everybody involved in the making of Caroline. Thank you.