If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite music gets from an artist’s brain into your headphones, Kevin Aldridge and Oil Boom’s Ryan Taylor have a little insight coming to you in the form of Good Sound, Needs Work.
Available Friday online at goodsoundneedswork.bandcamp.com, the collection of demos submitted by local musicians – the “backstories” to finished tunes, in Aldridge’s words – as well as unreleased material and sketches of future “hits,” is curated by Aldridge and Taylor. Aldridge told me the idea came from him and Taylor emailing each other “internet high-fives,” home-demoed songs or pieces of tunes strummed or hummed into their phones’ voice memo recorders.
“We were having text conversations in between the usual asinine group text jokes, talking about different kinds of songs, stuff Oil Boom would probably never play, old stuff I’ve never brought to my band. … It started like that, and I was like, ‘What if we did a no-frills digital release of these things, and then we started to pile on thoughts? What if we go to this guy, this gal, see what they have lying around?’ ”
Taylor, in the email he sent out to potential candidates, emphasized the project’s free-form nature. “There really aren’t any ground rules to this because rules are lame, other than it needs to be a demo, obviously, that you recorded yourself and not something you did with a full band or with Mutt Lange at Professional Generic Audio Fidelity Studio in Burbank. It can be as rough as you want (barking dogs, screaming children, Wheel of Fortune on in background) or as clear as you want. It can be classic songer-singwriter acoustic guitar/voice instrumentation but could also be you bouncing a basketball with multi-tracked falsetto vocals in the background and a weird synth part if that’s your bag.”
Though more may be added between now and Friday, the comp will feature demos by Aldridge, Taylor, War Party’s/Sur Duda’s Cameron Smith, Son of Stan’s Jordan Richardson, Daniel Markham, Claire Morales, and Johnny Beauford. To promote the compilation, Taylor, Aldridge, and Smith will perform nascent song ideas at 5pm Sunday at M.A.S.S. (1002 S Main St, 682-707-7774). Aldridge and Taylor intend to release subsequent volumes, but for now, the comp is really just an excuse for creative fun.
“I mean, we’re just a couple of goofballs who like to write songs,” Aldridge said.
