‘Everything is Borrowed’
2024
A note from the artist:
After recording music for years using digital audio workstations, plugins and tried and true recording methods, I decided to step out from my comfort zone and begin a new project using techniques that I’ve never used before. After developing a gravitation towards the analog grit of tape recordings, I started my search through ‘buy and sell’ online retailers for an 8 track tape recording device. After some unlucky purchases on eBay, I found myself on the tail end of a soldering iron trying to re-wire motherboard traces on broken plastic parts from the 80’s. To my surprise, I ended up being able to fix and sell tape decks, which I have documented on my YouTube channel. This gave me a better understanding of what tools were needed to make a new record. I ended up with a beautiful Tascam 488 Portastudio which became the foundation for building ‘Everything is Borrowed’.
Around the same time I was starting starting to explore new sounds and recording techniques, I was also toying with the idea of incorporating more lap steel or slide guitar into my recordings. I have always been a huge fan of the wailing sounds of the pedal steel, but I could only get so far on recreating this sound using a glass slide on a standard guitar. This led me down the road of building my own lap steel from a piece of reclaimed wood that I found on the side of the highway. Through the use of some very cool benders, handmade in France by Certano, I was able to build a lap steel and create a sound similar to a pedal steel that ended up being featured heavily on this album. I have a video of the lap steel build process as well.
‘Everything is Borrowed’ encompasses a wide selection of cover songs that have made an impact on me from different eras of my life. From early 50’s country and folk, to mid 2000’s post punk and indie rock, I wanted to bridge the gap of genres and time to create a single collection that summarizes a part of who I am as a musician. Some of these tunes have been bouncing around in my head for over a decade, so I wanted to do them justice in my own way and put them together to create the compilation that you hear today.