New Album: Some Guys

I’m very excited to make this secret project public today: I have a new album called Some Guys and it is covers of 70s soft rock songs that sound exactly like the originals. This is maybe not what anyone would have guessed was my next thing, especially me. But I really love it.

You can pre-order on Kickstarter RIGHT NOW!

In the 70s, I was sensitive kid who liked soft rock (both of those things are still true). These were some of the first songs that I remember really connecting to. I was always pretty sure that this was not a thing that made me cool, but now that I’m in my late 40s, I feel like it’s safe to come out as a soft rock lover. (Hello, I’m Jonathan, and I like Dan Fogelberg.) Lately, I’ve been listening to this kind of music a lot, rediscovering all my old friends, and I couldn’t shake the idea that it would be a lot of fun to just kind of make them again. I didn’t want to do new versions, I wanted to just rebuild the originals from the ground up. I wanted to live inside these songs for a while. I can tell you it felt very warm and cozy in there.

The album was produced by Solid State producer Christian Cassan, and I have to say, it sounds amazing. Most of the instruments are played by him and me, but we brought a few friends in for the stuff that was too hard. The rules: same keys, same tempos, same arrangements (as best we could manage). We hired real strings and real horns. We engineered and mixed in a way that we felt was faithful, but not slavish, to the original recordings, so the effect is this thrilling combination of old and new. I hope you like it as much as I do.

The release date is yet to be determined, but probably late March. Right now I’m running a Kickstarter to cover the cost of printing CDs and some really beautiful vinyl, designed by Gail Marowitz and Ed Sherman, who also created the grammy-nominated design for Solid State:

I mean: yum. More details are on the Kickstarter page, including a complete track list, and a pretty great video that explains the project and lets you hear a snippet of each song. As ever, I am grateful to all of you for supporting me in a way that lets me do things like this. I have the greatest job in the world. Thank you.

Stay soft everybody!