Jacob Lawson

I realize that in all lines of work one’s professional world often intermingles with one’s personal friendships but in music this seems to be especially true and especially important. As a freelancing musician you don’t just occasionally make a friend at work.  Instead, you and your closest friends labor and toil and hope that one day you’ll earn enough to call it your “work”.  When at last you reach a point in your career where you’re earning a living, you’re very likely to find that you have built a network of colleagues consisting largely of friends and people whose company you enjoy.  These few months of work have really highlighted for me what a positive thing this can be and I’m going to mention several of the projects in the upcoming posts.  Today, the subject is a new album project.

We’ve wrapped up producing and mixing Carol Lipnik‘s new album and it is utterly magical, just like Carol herself.  Carol and I have been friends for a great many years and a while back made another album together called Cloud Girl.  For this project she has been working with Matt Kanelos on piano and while I didn’t know Matt going into the recording process we have come out of it as friends and, hopefully, future collaborators.  To get a taste of Carol and Matt I’d recommend this live video of Oh, the Tyranny.  If you don’t know Carol, I urge you to listen to the whole track as she sneakily hides her powerful voice at the beginning.  If you’re impatient, please jump to 2:50 to witness how effortlessly she can sing whatever she darned well pleases.  The album is almost entirely piano, voice and strings but we wrapped them in a glowing, spacious world of reverberation that will hopefully invite you into Carol’s unique world.  I’ll write more when the record is released, but for the moment I’ll close this post with opening lyrics to Oh, the Tyranny.  This is an example of the wonderful art that my friends and collaborators make and, for all the ups and downs of being a freelance producer, creating records of poetry like this makes it all worthwhile:

Dreaming an ocean at twilight

Curled up asleep at the bottom of a rowboat

Untethered

Just before the storm……