Jason Gray Deluxe

Jason Gray again graced the Library studio with his presence yesterday. His new album will be released in September and my hope is that it will catapult him to a whole new level. Aside from helping him out with one of the songs for the new CD (see post from May 21st) he asked me to produce the tracks for the deluxe edition of his new record, which will feature an additional 8 songs. Several of them will be simply acoustic guitar and voice, the rest will have added sweeteners like drums, piano, upright bass, accordion, etc. My good friend Aaron Fabbrini (pictured) regularly assists me at the Library and is an enormous help to me with my work. Aaron and I played in Jason's band in the early part of the decade and even recorded a live album with him and a handful of other talented players. Knowing that he was coming in today, I asked him to bring his upright bass. The first time I ever recorded him on upright was for the Vicky Emerson project and he blew me away with his parts, tone, intonation, everything! Jason wanted to record the Tom Waits tune "You Could Never Hold Back Spring" for this deluxe edition. Last week I had asked my pal, Steve Haines to come in and play piano for it. As he and Jason fine tuned the ins and outs, I set up a snare drum and ride cymbal with a sizzler and just two microphones. We then captured this 2 minute, smoky, jazz number with just piano, voice, and brush kit. As we were listening back, Steve picked up my accordion and began to play along. So we sent him into the iso-room to track some squeeze-box. All it needed now to make it complete was upright bass, which brings us back to today. Aaron glued the whole thing together with his upright playing and did a phenomenal job. Since he was there we had him play upright on yet another tune and electric bass on one more. There are only a handful of bass players who play with such precision in this town and Aaron is one of them. I have just a few things to add to Jason's deluxe edition CD and then I can mix it and turn it in. For those who feel that this singer-songwriters new album leans a little too far into the pop-music camp, perhaps this deluxe edition CD will balance it out.