I’ve had the idea to make this album for quite awhile. I’ve written many, many, many times already about the RPM Challenge and my participation in it. There’s a situation you get into after doing a challenge like that for a bunch of years in a row is that eventually you’ve amassed a pretty large body of work around it and if you want anyone to check out your RPM work they’re confronted with like a dozen albums over an hour long and people (as you can imagine) will balk at the prospect of diving into it. Also there’s only so much promotion that feels appropriate for an album you make in a month, I’ve never felt my RPM albums needed to be on any of the evil streaming platforms. But I do feel very proud of the work I’ve made for the challenge and I wanted one place I could point people at to get all my favourite bits from the last 12 years, so I figured a greatest hits compilation might be a good idea and shilled out some bones to get it digitally distributed.
Of course calling the songs included “all my favourite bits” is a bit false because if I did that this album would be mostly tunes from 2018 and 2015 (I think those two are probably my best) I wanted this album to represent the breadth of my work on the challenge from the last 12 years so every album has 2 or 3 songs representing it. This project finally gave me an opportunity to design a double disc CD package, no one has commissioned me to do that yet so you gotta do it for yourself. I was planning for this album to come out a few months ago, but of course the pandemic hit and also since every song is off a different album, from a different year, using different gear, with a different sound, I had to do a remix and remaster on basically all 27 songs. I opted to only lightly touch the mixes for the most part, although a few songs get some new drum sounds and quite a few get a lot of bandages put on them, I wanted to keep more of the looseness of the RPM sauce than lose it. When I was picking songs to be included I wanted to showcase any time a special guest would show up and spice up the tune. The RPM albums are usually very solitary projects as efficiency is key in getting an album finished beginning to end within a month and every person you add to the chain slows the project down. But when I get a special guest on it’s always extra special to me so those songs like “There's only good times up ahead” with Chris McGee’s exquisite sax solo or Alison Corbett’s violin part in “Light Knife Woman” elbow their way up the list.
Anyway, I usually avoid a retrospective and I’m on record saying nostalgia and sentimentality is antithetical to my personality and outlook on life, so know that because of that this a larger more important project to me then would outwardly appear to most people. If you have the inclination please give it a solid sit down and listening to as I’ve spent longer then you’d think crafting transitions and tweaking mixes and making album art and all the other countless bullshit that goes into making an album. Mostly bullshit that I love but still mostly bullshit.
Music!