New Album: Max Hightow - he Blues Chooses You

Artiest/Band: Max Hightower New Album: The Blues Chooses You Release: Out Now Label: Momojo Records Format: LP/CD/ Digital Genre: Blues The studio was an old funky pink house with asbestos siding and plywood over the windows. Inside was like stepping back in time. Old pianos, a pump organ, Wurlitzers, Rhodes, a B3 Hammond, vintage amps, guitars and microphones everywhere.

 

• A cool twist of fate landed Max Hightower and four musicians in a Nashville studio, sweating it out live to analog tape with enough microphone bleed to hold it all together. Featuring Chicago's own Joe Moss on Guitar, The Blues Chooses You forges New Orleans juju and Carolina soul with a little Chicago fire...

The studio was an old funky pink house with asbestos siding and plywood over the windows. Inside was like stepping back in time. Old pianos, a pump organ, Wurlitzers, Rhodes, a B3 Hammond, vintage amps, guitars and microphones everywhere. The control room had a console from the 70s and a few reel to reel tape machines. The engineer Jack was open to anything. He pulled up all the thick rugs in the recording room. We didn't use any baffles or headphones.

Jack stuck an amp up on a shelf for a vocal monitor and a second vocal microphone running through my 62 Fender Concert amp. We all played in one room. It was 96 degrees outside and the studio only had the one small air conditioner that was in another room. When I say a lot of sweat went into the album, I mean that literally. After every song, we would have to go into the other room to cool off and hydrate.

The songs were all written and arranged, but once we began running through the tunes everyone’s ideas started flowing. Rob would say, “What ya think about this for the end”? Or someone would say, “What if the drums were halftime during the verses” ? Sometimes we would play through a song 4 or 5 times making changes or someone might flub up. We would cut it again until we knew that was the take, we were just playing off each other. You'll hear bleed in the microphones, guitar feedback, tempo changes, missed notes ... good stuff! Five guys sweating it out in one room trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

This album was recorded onto 2” tape (both ATR and RtM tapes) and MCI JH-16 tape machine and was mixed using a MCI 636 console. Not a computer. No overdubs. No fixing it later. That’s rare in the digital flawless AI saturated world we live in now.

A cool twist of fate landed Max Hightower and four musicians in an old funky pink Nashville studio, sweating it out live to analog tape with enough microphone bleed to hold it all together. Featuring Chicago's own Joe Moss on Guitar, The Blues Chooses You forges New Orleans juju, Carolina soul, with a little Chicago fire into a record that took on a life of its own. 

Tracklist:

1. Dedicated Fool
2. Train Smoke
3. The Blues Chooses You
4. Relationship Man
5. I Don't Know
6. Things I Used to Do
7. Do What You're Going to Do
8. The Hardest Thing
9. Stone Cool
10. Moonshine & Magnolias
11. Sherlock Holmes
12. The Blues Chooses You (Extended Version)

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	www.maxhightower.com

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