So this is a fun one! Today we’re doing a write up of my newest EP entitled CAMBRIA: The Lost Sessions that just hit streaming services while your wee little heads were asleep.
Before we go into each individual track and the meaning behind them, a little history lesson on how this EP came to be. Cause it nearly didn’t.
In 2019 I began to pick up the guitar again with the intention of writing a full-length album. I have been casually songwriting on and off again for the better part of two decades since I was 15 years old, but outside of a few clunky demos from my high school band and a set of three demos I wrote in college under the moniker Born In ’87, I didn’t have anything of my own that was properly recorded and fit for public consumption. So I set out to change that.
Over the course of the next year I kicked off a songwriting spree that formed the genesis of what would eventually become CAMBRIA: The Lost Sessions and (in about a month or so) my full-length debut album Yesterday & Forever Ago. The demos I wrote ahead of the formal recording sessions were rough, loose, and needed significant polish, but goddamn did it ever feel good to just write again. Music has been such a huge part of my life for so many years and being able to translate whatever I was feeling that day was incredibly helpful, especially considering the context which I was writing in– my daughter had just been born in February and the world was in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic without any sense of when we would be getting out of it. Life was heavy and wonderful and unprecedented, and songwriting was my release.
As the process went on I reached out to my longtime friend Zack to see if he would be interested in working together on a song or two to see where this this whole thing could go. Along with being the former lead singer of one of my favorite jam rock bands Givers & Takers, he’s an incredibly talented musician who was beginning to jump into the production side of the house. So we made plans to do the damn thing.
And do it we did. Over a nine month period from 2021 to the summer of 2022, juggling work, life as a new father, and quarantine, we got to creating. I made the seven hour roundtrip trek down to his home studio “The Box” in Cambria, CA for four weekend sessions and together we recorded a set of ten songs that would form the basis for what was going to be my debut album. It was scheduled to be released in August of 2022. We wrapped recording in late June, and after some post production work that I was able to do at home, Zack started mixing the final tracks. The process dragged on for a bit longer than it should have for a variety of reasons (transparently most of them incredibly frustrating), but after had a heart to heart in early November about getting this wrapped up before the holidays, things appeared to be on track.
Until they weren’t. On December 13th I got a panicked text from Zack detailing some computer problems he was having. It still feels like a gut punch looking at it now (and I know it does for him as well).
I’ll spare you the gory details, but the headline here is that when a computer crashes and all the data on that computer isn’t backed up, what you’re left with at the end of that event is just the rough mixes you’ve been trading back and forth via text over the past few months that still need proper leveling, processing, and editing (not to mention some spots you’d like to re-sing).
Put another way, all the actual raw tracks were lost and there was nothing we could do about it.
The road back from this has been painful and arduous. But ultimately it’s also been a fulfilling one. Zack and I have had to work really hard to repair our friendship (something we’re still working on), and have managed to deal with these emotions in parallel with re-recording material both new and old for the soon to be released full length. It’s deepened our bond and made us both better people as a result. There was a part of me that wanted to go back and re-record everything, but there was also a part of me that needed to let some of these songs go and allow them to stand on their own as the imperfect works that they currently are.
That’s what can be found on CAMBRIA: The Lost Sessions. A collection of three songs that mean the world to me, songs with flaws that the perfectionist in me struggles with somedays, works-in-progress that have found their final destination.
It has been a journey. And I’m very happy to share them with all of you today.
TRACK LISTING
01. Have A Good Day. One of the many voicemails we received from the company who has been trying to recover the computer data for the past eight months. Kid you not, they’re still trying to this day. It’s actually quite hilarious considering. Plenty of not so good days when we received those “Have a good day” updates, lemme tell ya.
02. Burn With Me [LYRICS HERE]. I always imagined this song as sort of a dark folk Romeo & Juliet love song about two young lovers who were unhappy with their current situation and contemplating leaving everything behind to run away together. The protagonist is waiting outside her window one night asking her to leave with him. This was my favorite song on the album when it was being written and was also was the first one we worked on together. My favorite moments in the song are Z’s piano line in the first chorus and the vocal harmony in the final chorus– that shit felt heavenly when we played it back the first time.
03. We Don’t Walk Alone [LYRICS HERE]. A song about friendship and finding strength in the bonds we forge together to help navigate all the extraneous stimulus we’re bombarded with every day. This was very clearly inspired by bands like Thrice, Underoath, Alexisonfire– I don’t have the vocal chops like Dustin Kensrue, but it was fun as hell to dial things up on the heavy scale. My favorite moments in the song are the second verse (love the guitar riff and the melodic break right before the chorus), with a close second being the guitar breakdown immediately following the bridge.
04. Colors [LYRICS HERE]. This song is about my wife and two beautiful kids. The number of smiles they collectively put on my face every single day has made me an incredibly better human being. They have taught me the joy of sacrifice. This originally was going to be the closer to the full length album hence the long guitar solo in the outro. That solo is so self-indulgent and ridiculously long that I decided to keep the entire thing out of pure laughs (it was my Thin Lizzy guitarmony moment, deal with it). Favorite moment of the song is the line in the second verse “Whether you fade in December gray or burn bright red in June / I see you in all your color”. It’s about accepting someone in their entirety with no questions asked. I love that line.
GEAR
Software/Hardware: Logic Pro X, Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, Apollo Twin X
Microphones: SE X1S, Electro Voice RE-320
Guitars: Fender Telecaster Pro II, Epiphone Les Paul Custom, Fender JA-90 Telecaster Thinline, Martin DCX1E, Fender Squier Bass (“Zack’s smooth ass Fender bass”)
Amps (Digital): Marshall JVM, Vox AC30, Fender Twin Reverb
CREDITS
Songwriter: Jason Matthew Plank
Music & Lyrics: Jason Matthew Plank
Producer: Zack Greenwald
Co-Producer: Jason Matthew Plank
