The Weekly Croissant: A Playlist for Production Inspiration

songs that guided me through the making of "Common Nation of Sorrow"

HEYO hope everyone is doing well.

I am deep, deep, in the trenches of rolling out my new album, Common Nation of Sorrow, which is being released on March 31st. It’s essentially the only thing I can think about at this point, and I’m looking forward to being on the road, when I will be too exhausted to think at all.

With that in mind, (and having no other mind at the moment), I want to share with you all a playlist that I made when I was getting ready to go into the studio. This was before anything was recorded at all, let alone mixed and mastered, and it’s cool to look back on what I was going for and compare it to how it all turned out. I think this playlist relates a lot more to the arrangement and performance aspects than the mixing, which I have a whole other playlist for, lol nerd alert.

Here’s the playlist if you want to check it out on Tidal (my recommendation) or Spotify.

When I look through these songs, all of which I’ve listened to over and over again, some for years leading up to this record, I think that they are for me the gem, or gems, of their respective records. They are the song on which the artist captured raw emotion in a perfect bed of sound, without over-perfecting or over-producing. I remember thinking i wanted to find the place at which the Ven diagrams of these songs meet. What are the similarities that made them all feel so special to me?

In my past work I think I have sometimes stretched myself too far, trying to grow so much in the process of recording, that I wasn’t quite ready to make the work I was trying for, so the record became the start of a journey towards a sound, rather than a great capture of an already existing one.

In this case, I was the producer, so I wanted to work in a zone I felt like I could take charge of. I wanted to know all of the rules already so that I could break them meaningfully.

You will see in this playlist that the music is all really comfortably sitting in my folk/americana wheelhouse. A lot of it features friends and people who actually played on my record, like Riley Calcagno, Miles Miller, and Josh Oliver. That’s because I wanted to capture exactly where I’m at, and what I can do now with the folks I know and love. I wanted to work in a production landscape that I could feel fully confident in, so that I would be able to accept my own imperfections. Because of that acceptance, I think it’s the best recordings I’ve ever been able to make.

I’m sure with the next record, I’ll try to move in some kind of weird and challenging direction, and find someone to push me way out there. And by then I’ll probably think this record is terrible. I guess that’s how the pendulum swings.

Anyway, hope you enjoy these inspiration songs as much as I do, and thank god for music!