Will Stenberg - Little River Sessions (2020)

Things run along really smoothly for a while, but the free love that’s going on starts to backfire. Jealousies and tensions rear up. The music gets darker, develops a cruel edge. Bikers arrive and some harder drugs move in. After one late-night swim under a full moon, one band member doesn’t return. Presumed drowned. Or was it black magick? That keyboardist had a witchy vibe, and a grudge.

No one ever finds out. The record comes to an abrupt halt. It is shelved indefinitely, then rediscovered decades later, a cult classic: to some, a masterpiece, to others, a shamble.

(In fact the missing band member is found alive years later, living on the streets of Santa Cruz, unable or unwilling to talk about what happened, just babbling about a song we had never gotten around to recording, something called The Chant of the Rhubarb Man).

Anyway, I wasn’t able to find a way to pull off this dream, time travel being only one of the obstacles. But a few years ago I did get together with some musician friends in a cabin in the woods. We hung out, and ate and drank, and drank, and made a record live in a room, the way they used to.

We were all interconnected, but had no previous history as a band. I showed them the songs, we ran through them, then recorded. The results are raw and real: authentic performances with all the dynamics and beautiful flaws and moments of inspiration that come from people actually playing music together.

One day we took a break to visit the widow of a great musician friend and borrow some of his guitars to record a tribute I had written to him. The first line of the song is about a crow, and if you listen, you can hear that a crow cawed just as we started rolling. That was pretty amazing, and apropos for Buddy Stubbs.

So, this is that record: not the imaginary one from 1973, but the real one from a couple years back. Being real, it can only be better.

I love it, loved the process, and in a perfect world I would never record music any other way than this: a bunch of friends in a house in the woods with nothing to do but hang out and play. May it happen again.