By the beginning of 2016, we had spent over two years working and reworking an attempted reboot of a concept album I had originally written in 1994. Ten different musicians had already participated in the band in one way or another and after only a handful of gigs and the departure of our bassist, things felt directionless. I asked Christopher Bohn, a regional musician who had recently moved to Lancaster, to collaborate on some ideas that I had been working on and to potentially join the band on bass and guitar.
I needed a break from the concept album and I didn’t want to play that material live before some sense of completion. As a band, we needed something to work on that would let us get out and play a few shows so we spent a little time digging through my back catalog and picked a handful of songs to work on.
“A Long Day” was originally written and recorded for my 1998 solo album called Artichoke. It had been somewhat forgotten as I stopped playing it out a few years later. Christopher and I spent a couple nights working on a variety of demos that took the song in very different directions. Finally, we found a path that included ethereal guitar over electronic percussion and lots of reverb soaked harmonies, which became the foundation for the dream pop sound that Anne and I would continue into our 2017 album CoalescE.
We released “A Long Day” as a digital single in April 2016 and were fortunate enough to have our friend, Aaron Spangler shoot this video for us at The Candy Factory in Lancaster, PA. – JM
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