Handled With Care Project

an Homage to Penny Lang

OUT NOW!

July 15th, 2022, would have been my mother’s 80th birthday. For those of you who don’t know her, Penny Lang was something of a folk music icon in Canada. She started performing when she was ten years old, with her Martin 0018 guitar, the very one I played for most of the songs on this album. When she passed six years back, I thought a nice way to pay homage to her legacy would be to record some of my favourite songs she’d written. But life got in the way. I was busy touring, writing, recording, and producing a few other artists, as well as taking care of my family. I never got to produce an album for my mother, so I wanted to make a record of her material in a way that I imagined she would have heard it, drawing upon her influences and the music I remember her listening to when I was a kid.

I also wanted to make this record old-school-style – no tuning vocals, no quantizing instruments, no back-vocal alignment processing, no sound replacement on drums – what you hear is exactly what I played and sang. I placed the microphones in a way that was pleasing to my ears, hit record, and played ‘til I got what I wanted. Just like in the good old days. So if you hear any little mistakes, any tuning issues or tempo fluctuations, it’s because they’re there. I intentionally left it all in. Each song was recorded and mixed in about two days. I played all the instruments – all of them real, and mostly beautiful old classics from the ‘50s and ‘60s. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it. If you do, please come out and see me at a show sometime. - JASON

Listen to the single: Plumb Tuckered Out