Soft Release This Friday

Back in 2018 I wrote a big batch of new tunes, about 30 within a month's time. These tunes were unlike most of the material I had produced prior to then; These were not my usual groove-based jazzy soul jams that you might have heard on my album The Friday Night Consortium, but rather these were more like pop-rock kind of tunes. Not sure what to do with them, I started calling around to some of my singer friends to see what it would sound like to have some different voices in the mix.

One of the first people that I connected with at that time was my very talented friend singer and guitarist Jodee Frawlee. Jodee and I had worked together on a few different live gig projects, but we'd never recorded together. Well it turns out that Jodee loves making recordings in the studio as much as I do, so we started doing some sessions and getting some great tracks down. After going at it off and on for almost two years, I finally felt like we had enough material to start doing some shows and dropping some singles.

I dubbed this project The Happiness, and in March of 2020 we played a live gig at Toad in Cambridge with Jodee, drummer Dennis Monagle and bassist Ben Alman. We even had a surprise guest appearance from my old buddy Nephrok! It was a really great night, and I felt like we were in a good position to start releasing some material and promoting it with some live appearances.

That would be the last show I played before the shutdown. Literally the next day after, all hell broke loose, and every show I had booked for the next six months was either cancelled or postponed indefinitely.

Photo by Matheus Viana. Click to listen.

Things got a bit derailed as I tried my hardest to cope with the new reality we all found ourselves living in. I'm not sure when The Happiness will get a chance to play live again, but in the meantime I don't see any good reason for these great recordings to stay in the vault any longer. So I am doing a soft release of our first single this Friday December 18, 2020 through my Bandcamp page, and it will be available to stream through Spotify and Apple Music on Christmas Day.

My plan is to start releasing music on a much more regular basis; I actually have a massive catalogue of material that has accumulated over the years, and the way I see it: there has never been a better time than now to get it all out there. Watch this space!