David Wax Museum - Secret Creature (2024) Hi-Res

Secret Creature is our first album made in the barn studio. As an experiment, we invited an audience to be seated in the balcony of the barn for the final evening session. The result is a living and breathing performance at the heart of each song.

We wanted the first barn record to lean heavily on the uniqueness of the space, and so we set up in a tight formation on the main floor (see the top photo for reference) and tracked the songs without headphones. In many ways, this record, produced by longtime collaborator Alec Spiegelman, is part of a trilogy of records (alongside Euphoric Ouroboric and Remember My Future). We made those first two records with Alec remotely, and so the perfect complement to that experience was to all be in the same room facing each other as we recorded it.

The main musical thread for this record is that all of the songs were written in open tunings on the guitar. In an effort to mitigate different hand pain issues I've been having for a while, I found that these open tunings allowed me to play guitar without putting too much stress on my wrist or thumb. Subsequently, and perhaps most surprisingly, these open tunings allowed me to fall back in love with playing guitar.