What's This Music For?

We’re just about ready to start a new series of Stories Behind the Songs for the Skeleton Crew album.  We’re going to do it a bit differently than with Transposition, however; instead of in order of appearance on the album, we will go in a more arcane order.  Just to mix it up, you know.

As the band Mother Zephyr was in its last days, John and I began wondering what to do next.  We both had completed songs we wanted to properly record, some of which had been played live by Mother Zephyr and some new songs were brewing, too.  We decided to resurrect Chameleon Red, dormant since 2009, and record the songs as that band.

We did some recording in the summer of 2012, though it was pretty late that year, after Mother Zephyr’s last show, that we really began recording full steam ahead, still writing songs all the while.  Recording extended until mid-June 2013; by that time, we had more than enough songs to fill an album.  We shot quite a bit of video while recording.

By happy coincidence, I was taking mixing and mastering classes back-to-back in the spring and summer of 2013, which came in handy when finishing up the album.  We selected the tracks and title for the album and commissioned Caitlin Rose Davis to provide cover art, toward the end of the recording sessions.  Because of changes in my schedule, completing the master took longer than expected; that was finally finished in October.  We delayed production of the CDs a bit longer in order to have the finished Chameleon Red logo, created by Mark Ray, on the CD itself.  The album was officially released in mid-January of 2014.