THOMAS HARDY (of DEAD CONFEDERATE)

I was actually inspired by my honeymoon. My new bride and I had very little money to spend on a post-wedding trip and I had coincidentally been asked by some friends in the band Bad Books to do a short tour in the Northeast, starting with a few days in NYC. I had never really played solo before, and certainly not in front of sold out crowds, but I had a handful of back-pocket songs and I knew that this was probably our only way to have a honeymoon, so that is what we did. The shows went well, yet I quickly realized that writing songs that can carry weight on their own, without a band in mind, takes a totally different approach. As soon as I got home, I wrote and demoed about 20 songs with that feel and idea in mind. Although I planned on having more instrumentation involved in the eventual recording of the songs, I wrote the initial songs as ones that could be played alone and still stand out.

FACEBOOK  ::  DEAD CONFEDERATE

My friend Ben Allen and I had talked about working together in some capacity for several years, but nothing had ever quite come to fruition. I saw him in Athens one weekend and told him about my 4-track recordings and he asked to hear them. I sent him the songs and we started coming up with ideas to develop them further. We wanted to add other instruments, but in a very limited way. We restricted ourselves to specific instrument (pedal steel, bass, drums) so as not to lose touch with the song itself. We completed recording in 3 days. What developed were recordings that breathed a bit of life into simple songs without taking anything away. I’m excited to see the collection of songs released this fall, and thank my friends Thayer Sarrano, Matt Pistol Stoessel, Payton Bradford, and Ben Allen for helping to see this recording project to life.