A Story of the Album Silver Sound by The Brother Jonathan  

The material is a mix of older songs of Tommy’s from his days Oakland CA and his new stuff, informed by the culture of Silverado, CA and by the people he was meeting at beaches and dives frequented from Santa Barbara to San Diego and east to the Coachella Valley, always with a notebook, a guitar, and a tenor banjo in tow.    

It was about this time the band started experimenting with using A=432 as our standard of tuning.  The reasons for this are varied but in short, we liked it. (Standard pitch is a bit higher at A=440).   

We decided to make the record at Jim Perkins’ Roshambo Sound in Irvine as the room sounded right and Jim being a such an audio whiz and wicked cutup, it seemed right.    

For the principle production Tommy’s dear friend, Jhon Renoir who agreed to truck down from a northern place in a clown-car full of some of the finest mics and preamps ever made.  In proper Jhon Renoir fashion, we set up to record so as to capture as much vibe as possible. Like his famous relatives, Jhon employs a sense of the natural when it comes to making art.

For him the live energy of a band is the cream of what’s being captured and so, anything that gets in the way of that is to be avoided such as strict isolation and over-dependence on headphones relying instead on informed microphone placement and expert baffling. 

And, he had Tommy sing “keeper” lead-vocals during these sessions so the performances we hear on the record are those recorded during the basic band-tracking, something more and more rare these days. The result is that the guy singing is, for example, adjusting his phrasing in real-time, in reaction to something the drummer played nanoseconds earlier and so on like a conversion, one the listener can hear subconciously.

We did our overdubs all over— at friends Geoff Pearlman’s, at Eric Ambel’s, and at Michael’s studio in Orange, CA where a list of great instrumentalists came in to put flourishes and brushstrokes to the thing.

To finish, Michael brought the tracks to Ed Stasium, the producer and engineer of so much great music by The Ramones, Talking Heads, etc., whom Michael knew from working with the band, The Smithereens. At Ed’s studio, Eight Palms Ranchero down San Diego County way, we did additional overdubbing then Ed set about to mix the record.   

Michael packed up the mixes into an invisible envelope of some kind and delivered them through magical conveyance to Brian Lucey at Magic Garden Mastering to supply a final dose of potion and poof, the record was complete. 

For the cover-art we chose Caterpillar Dream by pal Jeff Stratford.  Tommy and Jeff were friends from Oakland and Nevada City scenes and his art seemed perfect for what the band was about.    

Jeff Chase, another member of the Billy Talbot Band and designer of all Billy’s album covers, puts the Senor Stratford’s cover art into context with skillfull and soulful graphic sensibilities, providing layout, the logo, and lots of help with this site and with video.    

We recently met Matt Borden from The Omen Room who stepped in to help in several like directing and produce a series of videos with Director of Photography, Nate Louman. Matt’s selfless diligence and hard work helped us meet our April 10th release date.

Jack Sherman appeared as if from the ether, offering his skills and powers at a crucial hour by editing 13 videos. (Jack and Tommy grew up together in Cape Cod and were great pals starting in the 4th grade)

So now the record Silver Sound by the Brother Jonathan will be released digitally on most platforms on April 10th, 2020 along with videos and lots of fun stuff on this website which will be updated with new stuff.  We hope you enjoy it!