JUAN CARLOS - CD SLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS, STILL YOUR VOICE

Popis - SLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS, STILL YOUR VOICE:
Hello, friends. A few thoughts on this record, my first, scribbled around Boston, MA, over the course of a few nights in March 2012... I began to write some of these songs in the summer of 2007, long before I thought of recording an album. A quick rummage through dusty drawers yields a demo with “Caribbean Wind” and “I Miss Her” on it (tracks 6 & 1 above). They’re rough, skeletal recordings, but that was early days for me. I was working with a small electronic recorder I would set on my bed, moving my chair around the room in search for the right sound. The early “I Miss Her” plays a mere shadow of the opening track you’re about to hear, but jump to 2:52 in the album version, where the music subsides into the harmonica solo, and you’ll the same sound I’m hearing out of my old demo. When I was re-imagining the song, I feared I wouldn’t be able to reproduce that fragile, I-don’t-know-how-to-play-a-G-harmonica-in-D sound if I recorded the solo again, and, anyway, no point in fixing what was never broken. It’s strange to hear, in the middle of a track I could never have dreamed of four years ago, a little of that sound I made when the chair hit just the right place and the recorder lay perfectly propped against a couple pillows. Looking at the final songs now, it’s clear to me that the record makes no room for any others. I began recording seriously in the summer of 2010, moving through notebooks filled with hundreds of possibilities...these seven songs precipitated from those pages with the sureness of iron filings gathering around a magnet. I had initially narrowed down my choices to a list of approximately fourteen songs...some of the titles included “Hazel,” “The Phone Won’t Go Through,” and “Blue.” I began to work simultaneously on all of them, but quickly realized that there actually weren’t fourteen finalists, but rather seven, an unusually small number. I recognized an opening and closing within these seven songs, their own essential, internal drama. They spoke with each other loud enough for me to listen and move the rest aside. The album’s unusually long gestation, over the course of a little more than four years, seems a mixed blessing in retrospect. In between bouts of revising and recording, I continued my studies, putting off work on the album almost completely while at college. Every time I returned to it, I brought a fresh set of ideas and tools to the process. This surely made for a better album, but it also perpetuated the revision process. A thrilling recording in the summer of 2010 sounded anything but thrilling by the time winter unfolded. And so the songs repeatedly went in and out of the oven, none more so than “She’s Not Gone,” the final song on the record, which found itself a desolate blues ballad, acerbic rock number, and chiming acoustic ode at different points in time. Verses came and went, darkening pages in the process. A baroque organ part graciously bowed out near the end, making way for the recording you’re about to listen to. The resulting collection, these seven songs in their final recorded form, represents the very best I could think and feel in music and verse in the past few years. I’m thrilled to share it with you at last. I’m emboldened by a surprise it held for me a few weeks ago, when, in the middle of the most arduous part of the mixing process, the sound coming out of my speakers suddenly thrilled me like never before. My foot tapped and I wanted to sing, dance, play my guitar, write it a poem, go find the girl, turn up the volume, and then, at the end of it all, lay the sessions to rest with my seven little gems glowing brilliantly before me. This is not to say you’ll feel the same—but, hey, fingers-crossed!— but rather that I finally share these songs with you convinced that, for at least one moment, they not only stood up to my harsh scrutiny, but somehow thrilled me the way the music I love most thrills me. As I ready to take these songs on the road and to begin recording my next album, that feeling fills me with hunger for more and with the energy to pursue it. I hope you like these songs. Juan Carlos, April 2012