Rediscovery: 2 Records This Week
Damien Rice's "O" & Joshua Redman's "Elastic"
2025 was intense. I needed my professional life to grow. I needed it to bring in more revenue than it had in the past. And so, I pursued mostly event band work (corporate wedding bands, bar bands, solo hotel lobby jazz sets, etc…), other steady paying gigs (like my church piano gig on Sunday mornings in Times Square and a weekly residency as a sideman at an upscale hotel in Chelsea) and teaching. I’m glad I did. My musicianship grew. I made new friends. I diversified my professional network. Playing at church had the unexpected benefit of helping me reconnect with my faith in surprising and healing ways. I’m now a competent multi-instrumentalist on guitar, bass, piano, percussion, and voice. My production skills grew. I also had a lot of fun making good music with people I like.
However, that also meant side-lining my artistic pursuits. Creating art the way I want to takes money; and it takes stability outside of my musical life. I have a few projects that have been stuck on the back burner for lack of means to put them over the finish line in a way I feel good about. My last 12 years in NYC largely revolved around chasing art, and I finally hit a wall heading into the beginning of the year. By the end of the 2025 I was able to revisit and finish some big projects, like the record I’ve been working on since 2022. Having some success in my financial life this year, however, also came with tremendous burnout.
Over the last month, and especially the last couple weeks, I’ve been listening to records for the sake of inspiration. So much of my listening now is just so I can l learn the next 10, or 30, or 65 songs for whatever setlist I’ll be responsible for on my upcoming gigs. Right not, however, I just want to be excited about what I’m hearing. 2 records have stood out.
Damien Rice - O
For Christmas my fiancée got me Damien Rice’s “O” on vinyl. We listen to that record on streaming while playing boardgames together at night sometimes. It came out when I was in middle school and I was enchanted by the black & white live-in-the-studio music video, the smallness of the arrangements, and how tactile everything sounds. It’s that much more intimate in analog. She pointed out how she can hear the things I love about this record in my own productions. The space, the clarity of each sound source, the lack of clutter, the care for really hearing the acoustic instruments. As a singer-songwriter now well into my 30s it’s fun to revisit an old inflection point anew. To be fair, I think I’m a tad less whiny in my artist ethos than the young Mr. Rice, but then again, he was coming out of the 90s and wasn’t shaped by that classic Millennial cocktail of 9/11-2008 Recession-Pandemic - so I’ll allow him his charmingly wide-eyed self-indulgence regarding his various heartbreaks.
Joshua Redman - Elastic
The other record I’m digging came out in the same year, 2002 - Joshua Redman’s “Elastic” with Sam Yahel & Brian Blade. That kind of hard grooving, funk meets post-bop, with lots of blowing over vamps is one thing that really sparked my love of playing as a pre-teen and teenager. Up until I moved to NYC that was a lot of what I played. Then I arrived at Smalls (and a few other sessions around town) as a fresh faced 23 year-old and got my ass kicked on the bandstand several times. Thus began my bebop apprenticeship at the hands of this city. Reconnecting with a record that I only gave a cursory listen to when it came out was rejuvenating. To be fair, I was 12, in 7th grade, and there’s no guitar. But man, those guys are really going for it. I have much bigger ears now and can appreciate how grooving it is. You don’t get the same level of attention to form and widely roaming chord changes as you do with some of the hard hitting 50s stuff (Clifford Brown & Max Roach’s Quintet comes to mind), but that’s not the point here - which is refreshing for me. You also do get this fun, snaky unison line from Jazz Crimes, where they are so locked in and listening.
I’d love to know what records are you connecting with right now? Send me some recommendations. I’m excited for what sounds 2026 will bring!