and away we go

Friends, Family Album went off to be pressed and packaged today.
I'm taking heart in the fact that it is the birth date of one Elvis Aaron Presley.  I'm so superstitious that, yes, I feel better about doing Big 'n' Scary things on days when other great things have happened.  It surely can't hurt.  All of my projects are in a state of progress right now, some closer to the finish line than others.  It will feel good when I have something tangible to show for the millions of victories, large and small, that the past three years have been comprised of.

Since the album is literally out of my hands for now, it gives me pause to think about all of the other hands that have touched it, along the way.

We started the project in December of 2007, during a Boston blizzard.
Five days were dedicated to that original session, and from it, five songs survived.  That band was made up of my brother Boey Bertold, my mother Catherine Huebsch, Nate Edgar, Dave Walsh, Mario Quintero and myself.  There are days in your life that you look back on and wonder how you managed to get through them without your heart just throwing in the towel.  Boston was like that.  And those songs are so special and different, in both their sound and their spirit.  We couldn't re-create them now if our lives depended upon doing so.  I absolutely LIVE for art like that.

I sat with that experience for a while, and tried to make some of the other areas of my life function a bit better before I picked the project back up.  When I was ready, some of my closest pals came to Nashville for my birthday weekend in February of 2009.  That band was Jerry Roe, Seth Bodie, Levi Fuller, Eliza Wheeler, Jabe Beyer, Mario Quintero and myself.  We did two more songs over that little stretch of days.  The Nashville session had a different feeling for me, and I can hear it in the music, too.  There is laughter in there, and I thank god for that.

The final big session happened a month later, in Miami.  Mario and I went to our hometown to record the last handful of songs in the house that my brother and I grew up in, and that Mar and I had also spent a good deal of our adolescence hanging out in.  In our minds, we were going to do something very different than what actually happened.  In the interest of staying true to my music, which is an honest art, I'll tell you that parts of me were broken for good on that trip.  We did harness lightning and were part of some brilliant, beautiful moments... But, we also survived some massive disappointments, the likes of which may haunt me forever.  The band included Eddie Zyne, my mom, my aunt Nancy Huebsch, Mario Quintero and myself.

Additional performances by Carl Jackson, Dave Roe, Charlie Dechant, John Marsden and Josh Fuson were added later, to existing songs.  I edited the album myself out of necessity.  Sometimes you just don't have a masterful, patient recording engineer in your life at the moments you might like one to be.  Alas, I engineered many parts of the record, as well as produced it, and decided that it may as well be my duty to finish it.  I loved that process, though, I fear that If I were allowed to do it regularly, I would never leave the house.  I mixed it with Eric McConnell, over at his cool house in East Nashville.  Lots of magic had occurred there in past years, and man, you could feel it in the floor boards.  The dude's got juju.  (I can't wait to make a whole record over there, but that's a story for another day...)  Finally, the music made it's way to Ojai, California to The Mastering Lab where Doug Sax and Sunny Nam blessed it with their special stuff that they do over there.  (No one really knows what they do. They make their own equipment, and the knobs aren't marked, but your record's the better for having gone through it all it, for sure.)

The next stage was all visual in nature.  We entered the vast world of artwork, layouts and manufacturing.  I have this friend who turned out to be something of an actual wizard.  Ric Simenson did the art/layout for the record.  I can not praise his work enough.  He treated old family photos, dealt with xeroxed pages, bad scans, fabric and hand-written fonts... All beautifully.  He exceeded all of my expectations and really gave the record it's last bit of love that it needed in order to be DONE.  Ram Hannan did the hand-lettering on the front cover, and it's so lovely.

I don't know if you've been counting, but that's twenty-three people, in total.  And here we are.  It's quite a story, but it's all true.

Speaking of true stories, we're about to launch the kickstarter page for the first video that I will ever make in my life.  We've chosen to do a video on 'True Story', which is the opening song and first single from the record.
I need help, and I have a very hard time asking for it.  But, this is the time, if ever there was one.  This project has meant more to me than anything I've ever done, and I'm doing my best to see it to it's potential.  I have self-funded the entire thing, which is part of why it has taken three years to make.  It was recorded entirely in homes, by all of us who are on it.  There is now a place where people can go to help us make this video, which will, in part, tell the story of how I made this record about what family is for me:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/buickaudra/telling-a-true-story
Family is crazy. It's life-affirming, disappointing, maddening, wonderful, messy, and it's how we learn about who and what we are.

I'm off to rest, and send good vibes to all of the little parts that make up the whole of the finished product, wherever they may be now. Godspeed.

Thanks for listening.
xoxo, bu