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