put on what you wanna (jackpot! sessions 2001)
The 2001 Jackpot! Sessions yielded the basic tracks of fourteen songs, then were abandoned, caught in a flux of creative desire & elusive synthesis.
I was living in Alberta on allotments of time defined by intermittent Canadian work permits that allowed me to cross the border when necessary. Most of my belongings were kept in a storage space in Bellingham WA, seven hundred miles from my Edmonton base. I’d pick things up or drop them off there as needed when passing through. In mid-February, I headed southeast through Saskatchewan & Manitoba to pick up a musician in Minnesota, then continued in on-&-off zig-zags between continental shelves. My album The Hill had been released a few months before. At first, we ambitiously attempted to play The Hill in one continual piece, as heard on the album. After a few shows, we split it in two — then more — then conceded to the physical reality. With about twenty instruments & other gizmos surrounding us onstage, it was logistically overwhelming with just the two of us, already using all eight of our limbs over strings, pedals & other devices in-between.
The tour paused in Portland OR nearly three months later. I’d booked time at a studio called Jackpot! Recording. The owner & I originally met in mid-eighties Chico Calif as local musicians & bumped into each other irregularly over the years.
The first April/May session was five days split between two drummers. Behind the board, the engineer/studio owner along with JD Foster.
Another five days followed with just me & JD, transferring a few home minidisc demos from my Yamaha MD8, re-recording solo songs & layering overdubs on all. We met one more time two months later — a few days for pedal steel tracking & a last five for what I’d assumed would be final mixes.
They weren’t, but eventually would be, by default.
Ultimately, those 2001 recordings would remain as unfinished basic tracks. I moved into a larger place in Edmonton with an entire basement at my disposal & transferred the rest of my instruments out of storage. I bought a Roland 2480 recorder, leafed through the manual & simply started over. Just seven songs survived the Jackpot! Sessions, in written form anyway. All were re-recorded, along with another eight that came suddenly over the sequestered Alberta winter. I finished, this time with no assumptions about resolution, just about what naturally unfolded without the pressure of money & time, except for completing a subconscious thought — a thread that wasn’t there during the Portland stretch — something that eventually arrived as mysteriously as it hid when it was expected. The transmutation led the way to the fully-realized outcome, Impasse, released in Oct 2002.
