May 9th, 2011

I know that during the past several years there have been several announcements through various channels that I was on the verge of releasing new Traveler’s Dawn material, a new record, and that each of those times the news has never culminated in an actual release. Well, I’m pleased to be able to announce that there finally now exists a new Traveler’s Dawn record that actually will be released as soon as it is finished and ready for the light of day. I promise and swear upon my Les Paul Standard that I am not jerking you around this time and it is safe to become mildly excited if this news interests you. It is a full record that currently sits at 13 tracks, with the hope that one or two more will be added before release. The new record is untitled as of yet, but I’ve been calling it the Allston Lane Sessions for awhile now behind closed doors simply because its the first meaningful TD recording to come out of the humble project studio I built four years ago at that address. So far, what I have to tell you is this: It’s basically a “live-in-studio” record and it has been an absolute ton of fun to make.

This new record started out as me just messing around in the studio making home videos of some unreleased TD songs that were to be destined for YouTube. I had gotten ambitious, gone back, and dug out all the old half finished songs that had been set aside unfinished as making the second TD record got pushed farther and farther onto the back burner by other priorities in my life, and I went on a week-and-a-half-long writing binge finishing as many of them as I could using ideas that had been building up in my head for ages. I knew that life wasn’t going to give me large uninterrupted blocks of time like I used to have in the old days to work on this project and I knew that if I let my inner musical perfectionist have free reign over the creative process I’d never get anything accomplished in the limited time I had to dedicate to it all. I knew this because it’s been the pattern that has been repeating itself each time I’ve tried to get new material recorded now for 5 years. Making the recordings, therefore, involved an entirely new approach for me compared with the way we made the first TD album. Rather than being carefully constructed a track and a piece at a time, at the heart of each of these new recordings is an acoustic and vocal performance of the song done straight through, usually in a single take, just vox and acoustic guitar. Rather than trying to play through each of the parts mistake free and correct anything that went wrong in another take, I focused instead on capturing energetic and natural live recordings of the songs even if that meant leaving obvious mistakes on tape. There was no click track, no headphone mix, etc., just me and my guitar with two mics in the booth.

My expectations weren’t real high going into making these recordings and in the end that kind of took the pressure off and made all the difference in the world, in my opinion. When I went back and listened to the first few, I was shocked to discover that I was really excited about how they sounded. Though I always wanted Traveler’s Dawn to be a moderately hard rock, electric guitar driven project; many of you know that my roots as a musician are as more of a folk music, Americana, acoustic singer-songwriter-type. I pushed my material towards the style and genre that I wanted my project to be, and I’m glad I did because I love to rock out as much as anybody; but, there have been cases where the material I’ve written and that harder rock style didn’t always fit like a glove. These new recording sessions gave me a chance to really hear some of my songs produced in a style that is more like the style in which they were originally written: me and my acoustic guitar. Adding bass and some keys, etc., to that foundation in overdubs gave the songs some very nice sonic depth and intrigue but keeping it comparatively chill also allowed some of the details and nuance of these songs to shine through where in a more rocked out format those kind of subtleties are kind of lost in the wash of sounds. There are still rockers on this record, for sure, but they are just presented to the listener differently because of the simplicity of how they’ve been recorded. It’s been a refreshing change for me, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Another tremendously fun part about this process has been being able to revisit some old Traveler’s Dawn tunes with the perspective of having played these songs hundreds of times in the past six years and yet being able to hear them in a new way now and record them as I’ve added to them and come to play them through repetition, rather than how they were originally recorded. More than half of the record will be brand new, never-before-heard stuff; but while most new listeners will probably be hearing TD for the first time, I think even old TD supporters won’t feel cheated by these revisited tunes appearing on the record because they are presented in very different ways than you’ve heard them before.

So, to wrap this up, there really is going to be a new Traveler’s Dawn record. It’s going to be kind of a “live-in-studio” acoustic vibe (maybe VH1 Storytellers-ish?) and I’m honestly really excited about it. It’s simple, it’s stripped down, it’s low budget, and at least for now the plan is to mix and master it myself; but, musically I feel like it is a big step forward for me and something that people are really going to get some genuine enjoyment out of.

Sincerely,

DH