We spent all of February working on a new album. Just like last year when we created ALL IN A DAY'S WORK, we decided to once again take up the Record Production Month (RPM) Challenge and produce another album. It's just this time we had one extra day (2-29-2008) to complete it!
The new album's called SHAM ROCK and it's Beatnik Turtle's take on some of our favorite traditional Irish pub songs. Most of them have the guitars cranked to 11, thus the name John Owens came up with for the album.
Since we write/record songs all the time, we wanted to try something a bit different. So, we hit on the idea of a new creative exercise: we would try to reinvent 10 public domain songs and "make 'em our own." We stumbled on this idea when we recorded a Beatnik Turtle version of "Beer Beer Beer" and "All For Me Grog" two years ago when we recorded it for a podcast (and also released it on TheSongOfTheDay.com). We had a blast re-interpretting the songs in our style and found ourselves drawing on different song-crafting skills. So we figured, why not go "all in" and do a full album?
The challenge here is you're not building a new house, you're remodeling. You're hampered by something that's already there: a melody, a lyric, a chord progression. Something you gotta work around.
The hard part then becomes: how do you reinterpret it so it's fresh? How do you rearrange it so it sounds like something you’d do? How do you tweak the lyrics? The rhythm? The instrumentation? Where can you add new parts? Etc.
Well, through a lot of hard work, creative energy, and lack of sleep, we managed to create SHAM ROCK. We've handed in the 10-song version to RPMChallenge.com, but are now working on the full-length album to add to our catalog. Like ALL IN A DAY'S WORK, we'll be adding 3 more songs recorded pre-February 2008: remixed and mastered versions of Beer Beer Beer, Whiskey Yer The Devil, and All For Me Grog.
So, look for the album soon at iTunes, CDBaby, Last.fm, Nimbit, and of course, TheSongOfTheDay where we're continuing with a song a week!
It's got Irish favorites like Tell Me Ma, Mary Mac, Finnegan's Wake, The Holy Ground, Old Dunn Cow, and more. It's just these versions sound like we just might have written them.
