#music

Three years. Three years since the last post in which I announced that recording for Oxygen had begun. That’s quite a while, and you may be wondering, did it actually take three years to record an album?

Yes and no.

Yes, the record is now finished three years later! Oxygen is due out on May 2, 2025 on Rare Bird Recordings (Sony Distribution) – vinyl and digital.

No, it did not take three actual years of work in the studio. About 15 days or so if I had to guess without taking the relatively small amount of time to get the actual number of days. But as it was recorded in Los Angeles (and I live an 8 hour drive away) and involved quite a lot of coordination plus financial timing issues, three years it has been.

However, the album IS finished and I hope you think it was worth the wait. For me it was. I’m super proud of it. Mike Taklender – the Quartet’s drummer – and I co-produced it along with Andrew Bush of Grandma’s Warehouse Studio (where the album was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Andrew).

More news to come as you might expect. I’m still working and evolving as a singer/songwriter, and I’m pretty happy about that.

Sid Hillman, back in the studio…

A somewhat long story that I’ll shorten. In 2018 I quit all social media. Didn’t just take a break. I stopped, deleted, walked away. It was an experiment of sorts, and I figured I could always get back on, but…I quickly discovered a change (for the better) in my life. A breath, space, silence. And then, for the first time in many years, songs began to come…

I wrote. Then I wrote some more. And after a year or so I realized I had over an album’s worth of songs. My next step was to demo them. In my podcast/music studio – I threw down the songs one by one, and then stepped back for a time until I began to listen. What I heard was an evolution. Songs shaped by a break from music, by a return to my love for music, and to a much different life than the one I had lived for years in LA with the Sid Hillman Quartet.

I sent the demos to the quartet guys – all still in LA – and heard nothing back. Nothing. Silence. So I sat on the songs again, not sure how to proceed because by this time, the ol’ pandemic had taken hold. And then…a random text from the Quartet’s drummer, Mike Taklender. “I have a surprise for you.”

We jumped on a Facetime call and he let me know that after some personal tragedy, he finally made it to the songs and had laid down some test drum tracks. That was it. It was time.

This record is now happening. I drove to LA and went into a studio with Mike for the first time in 17 years and it was like we’d never left. We jumped into the songs and recorded guitar, drums, vocals over 3 very long, very full days. Andrew Bush, the studio’s owner engineer, and damn find musician, recorded the bass tracks over the following few months. I have test mixes in hand and am listening for additional parts – tracks to add etc. I will be heading back down to LA in fall 2022 to continue the work.

This is a solo album. This is me getting back into thing that brings life into my life.

This is “Oxygen.”