What do you do with a collection of live performance cuts recorded during a pandemic? You release a live concert album, naturally. Well, sort of live, but not really.

While working to improve the quality of our streaming concerts we wound up with a collection of audio recordings we were REALLY happy with.

We’d been granted use of a 200-seat event hall so we had set up everything - stage lighting, backdrops, PA, amps, drums, overhead mics, four cameras, and a simul-record broadcast rig all to perform for… no one. Not even an audio engineer. With Florida’s pandemic shutdown it was challenging just getting the four of us together and even though we hadn’t been on a stage together in more than three months, the live stream concert went off without a hitch. Just for fun, we had rolled the multi-track recorder and later as we listened and watched the video replay we realized we had something special.

I was amazed at the energy we had captured. We knew that people scattered across the web were watching us as we stood in a small pool of light in that darkened room but the empty chairs and the deep silence between songs felt Twilight Zone-ish. With no way to build that energy loop between band and audience all we could do is draw our focus inward and merge with the music.

I listened to the recordings and honestly could not remember playing some of the things I was hearing. It was an amazing moment and we had captured it live, with no overdubs.

It was the silence at the end of each song that was the rub.  

Right away we discarded the idea of flying fake applause in after songs but I thought, why not add segments between songs talking about a backstory or setting up the vibe of the song – like radio show hosts and podcasters do? It’s a weird year. Let’s make it a weird album.

Over beer and burgers we came up with some chat segments and from that we created this quirky ‘not-so-live’ live album recorded during a time when the world had hit the pause switch but we were still “ON”. To give the project the tongue-in-cheek gravitas it deserved, I reached back to movie newsreels from the 1930s and Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” for inspiration.

I hope you dig LIVE! From the End of the World! First Wave. Stay tuned for Live! From the End of the World! Second Wave, coming Dec 1, 2020.

Rusty Wright