This summer saw the release of Joe Bourdet's brilliant debutalbum, Meadow Rock. It's an album that feels like a lost classic from the heyday of the soft and mellow sounds from the canyons and beaches of California. Mr. Bourdet may be a new face for many, but he's been around for a while. We sat down in front of our computers and had a little talk about the new album, Colorado and as always a little bit about Poco.
Heartworn Highways: Congrats on the new album. Could you tell us a bit about your background and how the album came to be?
Joe Bourdet: I suppose it's the culmination of all of my musical efforts thus far, and the arrival of something like my own "sound", which, If I'm singing, must necessarily be pretty laid-back. I've been playing guitar since high school, and have been living in Los Angeles for the last decade or more trying semi-seriously to "turn pro." I have a background in building guitars and amplifiers, and also in film sound recording. Knowing that stuff has certainly helped on the technical side, where I try to put my own stamp on things as well.
HH: We've been following you since first hearing the Whispering Pines album from 2008, and then discovering your name on the Painted Hills album as well - How was it working in those bands?
JB: I loved both of those bands. I'm still in communication, via a group text, with the Whispering Pines boys almost daily, mostly just to make inside jokes and some irreverent armchair analysis of current events. Working with Painted Hills was easy, Josh Schwartz was a real mentor to me then, and he called all the shots, my job was to rise to his example as a guitarist. Had Josh not gotten sick (We lost him to ALS), I think we would have ended up writing together. We attempted to write on an unreleased song called Seven Easy Pieces that was demo'd but never released. Someday that may be heard.
HH: Wow, that is something we would really love to hear. We love all things Josh here at Heartworn Highways HQ. We feel that Meadow Rock is an album that sounds like a "lost classic" in the sense that it could have been released in the 70s alongside a lot of the classic albums around that time. Is that where most of the inspiration comes from?
JB: Yes, and I tried very hard to make it stand up with those old albums in terms of quality, and the bar for that is very very high. I find the old stuff more moving and relatable than contemporary music, maybe because it's more innocent, more earnest, sometimes naively utopian, and other times has this great disillusioned melancholy. I've tried to avoid smugness, or kitsch, or gratuitous referencing of other classic albums, the listener will have to decide where I've succeeded or failed there.
HH: In our ears you have definitely succeeded. We have to talk a bit about the production of the album. To our ears it's the best sounding album we've heard in a while. Have you produced and engineered most of it yourself or have you had a sparring partner in getting these classic sounds. Feel free to get a bit nerdy here. We can take it.
JB: I did produce it, but I left that credit off because it sounds too pretentious on an obviously self funded solo album that already has my name all over it. Besides myself, there were two other tracking engineers involved, Jason Soda, who recorded the drum tracks on four of the songs (Songbird Revisited, Amongst The Pines, Seamist, El Capitan), and recorded several fantastic guitar overdubs and our dual solos on Songbird Revisited and Mantra. Another engineer in New York City, Dave Lindsay, recorded a lot of Lost Along the Way with Alana Amram and myself when I was out there on a visit. I continued to add overdubs to the song, including Will Scott on drums, back in Los Angeles. Mixing the album was done by myself, and I would regularly send bounces of my mixes to several trusted friends for their analysis. Rob Douglas, Wayne Faler, and Vic Martin in France all patiently listened to sometimes tedious and obsessive mix adjustments and revisions on my part. I also subjected them to all kinds of A/B listening tests as I was restoring the Otari half track tape machine that ultimately all of the album mixes passed through. I believe firmly in redundant checks, it's also a less lonely way to go about your work. Finally, for mastering, I had one and only one engineer in mind for the vinyl, Kevin Gray, of Cohearent Mastering. Kevin recommended Dave Collins for my digital mastering and that worked out great too. I told them, "little to no limiting" which is perhaps a bizarre request for a rock record, but I'm disgusted with the loudness trends today and wanted to offer a clear contrast to that shallow contemporary sound. We ended up limiting the song Call You Friend a Db or so to get it to sit right in the song sequence, and that's all. If there are subtle intangibles with my record that cue the viewer that this is an old recording, lack of bus limiting is certainly one of them.
HH: Has the pandemic had any impact on the recording of the album, or how has it affected you?
JB: The pandemic forced me to stay home and work on the album every single day until it was finished, the overdubbing and mixing was all done very slowly, and the arrangements were more discovered than premeditated. Fortunately, I had built up my home studio sufficiently by that point so that this was all possible, VERY fortunate.
HH: We included El Capitan on one of our mixes and coupled it with Stephen Stills/Manassas - Colorado since we feel that the songs at least musically feels like kindred spirits. We have also talked a bit about songs from and about Colorado another time. Do you have any connection to Colorado yourself? Why is it that that particular state has inspired all these great songs do you think?
JB: I have no real connection with Colorado, but I'm certainly a fan of the many Colorado themed songs from the early/mid 70s, and also the concept of the Caribou Ranch style remote studio. To name a few, Joe Walsh, Firefall, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Stephen Stills and Manassas to all had these vibes going and they're all big reference points for my stuff. Of course, I don't write songs about Colorado because I haven't spent significant time there. I tend to gravitate to Utah, it's beautiful, varied in landscape, and I have dear friends there. That may be more fertile ground for a song these days. We'll see.
HH: What is Meadow Rock? Is it an actual physical rock or is it a label for the music you are playing?
JB: In a pretty major music doc that I can't recall the name of, Randy Newman explains that he used to disparagingly refer to a certain tendency of pastoral soft-rock of the 70s as "Meadow Rock." It seemed like an appropriate and cryptically self-deprecating title for my album, and yes it also provided a convenient pun for the album cover photo shoot where I'm sitting on a rock wall in a meadow near my family home.
HH: Had not heard that Randy Newman anecdote before, but it's a fitting term. Both for the whole genre and for your music. You've pretty much coined it. We've riffed a bit about Poco from time to time, do you have a good Poco story to end things with?
JB: Sadly, I never got to see Poco, but I did see Buffalo Springfield play an incredible set at the Bridge School Benefit. The show was in a misting rain all day and I had some family and friends there, it is a great memory.
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