Every album has a story.
My parents gave me my first 4-track tape recorder for Christmas in 1994. I’d never written a song before but I needed something to put on tape, so I started threading together chords and melodies, layering one idea over the last, trying to tell a story.
I feel lucky to live during a time in which recording is so accessible. The 4-track has been replaced with a laptop and I no longer mix down to my parents’ tape deck, but I still feel like a 14 year old kid with a blank canvas every time I begin a new project. And as technology continues to advance and more can be done in a home studio, starting out on the 4-track taught me a valuable lesson: Work with what you have. Resources will always be limited, but creativity has no limits.
My albums:
- Life Is Loud (2007)
- Cameron Mizell (2004)
Albums as a sideman or collaborative efforts:
- Sounds Like Snow (Be Still, 2009)
- Pour A Little Everything Else (Erika Lloyd, 2009)
- On Your Back Porch (Lauren Zettler, 2009)
- Follow Through (Matt Ketteman & Cameron Mizell, 2007)
Life Is Loud (2007)
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After moving to New York in 2004, I made a goal to form a new band and start working on a new album within two years. That task proved to be more challenging than I thought–my wife and I moved to the city with no jobs and no savings. I don’t think we had much of a plan beyond living in New York, where we both felt we could reach for bigger and better things (as Frank Sinatra used to sing…).
Ten months passed between my last gig in Indiana to my first gig in NYC, and during the first five months I hardly even picked up my guitar. I was busy trying to make ends meet by selling sofa beds and office supplies! My priorities felt like they’d been turned upside down. Once I started playing again, the songs on Life Is Loud began to materialize. Tunes like “Soulfunksticat” and “The Whipper” were edgier and more aggressive than the music I’d previously written. The title for the album came to me on the subway, a couple weeks after we finished recording. After the album was released, I was interviewed and explained the meaning behind the title:
“I’m constantly bombarded by sound in NYC; there is noise here all the time. The title of the CD, Life Is Loud, represents both the literal audible noise, and also all the figurative noise going through my head in this hyped-up, iPodded, smart phone, multitasking society–both of which are amplified in a crowded city like New York. Completing this album amongst all the noise turned out to be a big endeavor, so Life Is Loud just sort of hit me as a kind of Hemingway-esque statement of how the music I make has changed since coming to New York.”
Life Is Loud is available at: iTunes // CD Baby // Amazon
Cameron Mizell (2004)
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While in Bloomington, Indiana, I gigged with two bands. The first was a straight-ahead jazz trio. The other was an 8-piece funk band. One part of me knew that the trio setting would challenge me to grow as a musician. For a guitarist, playing with just a bassist and drummer forces you to use space wisely. You don’t want to overplay, but you also don’t have any other harmonic instruments such as another guitar or piano to fall back on. Perhaps the 8-piece band was to compensate for the sparse surroundings of the trio. The larger band also provided me with a chance to arrange for a small horn section. The real reward for a composer is hearing a group of musicians play your music, and this group motivated me to experiment with my ideas.
Before Indiana, I was living in Denton, Texas studying jazz at UNT. I learned a lot about jazz, but I also got turned on to underground hip hop by my roommates. That led me to go deeper into funk music, especially the music of James Brown. The move to Indiana gave me a clean slate as a musician–nobody knew what I sounded like as a college freshman–and somehow this gave me the confidence to really play out and start developing my sound.
Initially, I recorded my two bands simply to document the music I’d been playing in Indiana before moving to New York. But the recordings came out well, we were all happy with the performance and the sound quality, so I turned it into my first album. I hoped that, at the very least, it would give me something to hand to people in New York as I tried to book gigs. To my surprise, people wanted to buy it. The money I made from this album provided much of the financial backing I needed for my future projects, and it continues to sell today. I’ve come a long way as a musician since this album, but it represents a time in my development where I grew leaps and bounds. I still crack a smile and remember my friends from Bloomington everytime I hear the downbeat of “Eddie’s Theme.”
Cameron Mizell is available at: iTunes // CD Baby // Amazon
Sounds Like Snow (2009)
Be Still
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In the summer after recording On Your Back Porch, Lauren Zettler and I were gearing up for a small Midwest tour. At this point we’d been working together for about a year, pretty much focusing on the same material, trying to make our performances as tight as possible. We both felt the need to change things up a little so we wouldn’t burn out. Since the recording process for On Your Back Porch was a great catalyst for creativity, we decided to start a studio side project–something that would allow us to have fun and record whatever we felt like without worrying how it would translate to the stage, or whether the sound didn’t fit what we were trying to do with Lauren’s music.
That’s how Be Still was conceived. It’s sort of a band within a band.
We decided to record a Christmas album, for a few reasons. First, it’s easy. The songs are already written (save the title track, an original by Lauren), all we have to do is play them. Second, it’s challenging. There are thousands of Christmas albums out there, so we had to come up with original arrangements. Third, people tend to either love or hate Christmas music. I used to hate it, but through a project like this I found a new appreciation of each song. Hopefully this album turns people’s ear and they hear the songs again for the first time. And last but not least, in the wide world of the internet, people tend to seek out Christmas music more than original music by artists they haven’t heard of. This album is one way to lead them to more of our work.
Under the cloak of a different moniker, we were free to experiment with different sounds. For example, since we both play guitar, all of our music is rather guitar-centric. But on a track like “Silent Night,” we used harmonium and glockenspiel as a starting point. As a contrast, songs like “Christmas Time Is Here” or “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” rely heavily on a single guitar part, and I approached the accompaniment much like I would backing a jazz singer. We also reharmonized many of these tunes. In some cases that meant simplifying jazz chord changes to make the song sound more like singer-songwriter fare, “Christmas Time Is Here” is a good example of that, and other times it meant doing something unconventional, such as the pedal tone and dissonant harmonies on “I’ll Be Home For Christmas.”
Finally, the album would be nothing without Lauren’s vocal, which is a perfect fit for the nostalgia conjured by every lyric. We also used her voice as another instrument, creating ethereal vocal pads in the background on many tunes. There’s no way we could pull that off live, but as Be Still, we didn’t have those limitations.
All in all we had a great time recording this one and learned a lot. Who knows, maybe this will become one of your favorite holiday albums!
Sounds Like Snow is available at: iTunes // CD Baby
Pour A Little Everything Else (2009)
w/ Erika Lloyd
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Erika Lloyd and I met in a music theory class at Indiana University. It turned out she also lived about a block from me, so we started hanging out and playing music together from time to time. She moved to NYC about a year after my wife and I did, and along with her boyfriend (and organ player in my trio) Brad Whiteley, has become one of our best friends in the city. It was only natural that we’d record an album together.
Erika writes music with Brad for their band Little Grey Girlfriend, so we wanted to do something different. A covers album seemed like a great place to start. When Little Grey Girlfriend performs, they traditionally throw a cover song into the set list, so that gave us a few options to start. Beyond that, Erika chose songs that spanned her tastes in pop music, from Joni Mitchell to the Cocteau Twins.
Little Grey Girlfriend didn’t have a guitar player, so working with me was already going to be a change of pace for Erika. On one of the first tracks we recorded, I doubled the acoustic guitar part by strumming with the fleshy part of my thumb to get a mellower, darker sound. Erika’s reaction was priceless, “I never realized how much is going on with a guitar, all the harmonics and overtones…”
Likewise, working with Erika was a great experience for me. As a trained classical singer, she has incredible range and control over her voice, a very distinct vibrato, and she shows up prepared. I’m always ready to work, but her organization for this project almost made me feel like an amateur. Her vision for each track was inspiring, and it pushed me to create the best guitar sounds behind her vocal.
Pour A Little Everything Else is available at: iTunes // CD Baby.
On Your Back Porch (2009)
Lauren Zettler
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I first saw Lauren Zettler perform sometime in late 2007. She had a guitarist on stage with her, and after the show she asked me what I thought. I remember thinking she was great, but the guitarist did nothing for her music. He didn’t take away from it, but he definitely wasn’t adding anything. I wasn’t sure why he was on stage. I remember this, because 6 months later Lauren asked me if I’d play a couple shows with her. Time to put my money where my mouth is.
Lauren is the type of songwriter that continually impresses me each time we work together. At our first rehearsal, she taught me her songs material from her first EP Call Me Out, and then played a new song, “Call Your Bluff.” At that point the gig changed for me. To me, this song showed a new level of maturity in her song writing. It was clear that she put a lot of thought and effort into every bit of her music. It’d be a crime for me to do anything less.
A month later, in August of 2008, Lauren came to my apartment in Brooklyn and we recorded “Small Town Love” for a contest. We continued recording at whatever rate new songs were completed. The arrangements grew from the recording process. It was incredibly organic and relaxed.
I’d done a number of recordings with my meager home studio rig before this one, but the feeling from that first rehearsal carried over into the recording and production process. I felt like I needed to step up my game. I’m very proud of the quality on this album and feel like the playing and production serves Lauren’s music well. I hope you agree!
On Your Back Porch is available at: iTunes // Amazon
Follow Through (2001)
w/ Matt Ketteman
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Matt Ketteman has been one of my best friends since high school. He sang in a couple of my bands, but most of the time we’d just sit around with our friends and play songs. Whenever we got together, we made sure there was a guitar nearby.
We went to different colleges, and so we only saw each other during holidays or the summer. In the summer of 2001 we were at my parents house watching The Big Lebowski (drinking White Russians, of course) and realized that this would probably be the last summer we were both in St. Louis. Maybe it was the drinks talking, but we immediately decided to record some of the songs we’d been playing together for the last few years.
There was very little thought put into deciding our repertoire. We played any song that we liked, any song that was an inside joke with our friends, or any song that our girlfriends liked. When we decided to record, we thought it’d be a good idea to record the songs our girlfriends liked.
We recorded eight songs in my parents basement that week while they were out of town. After returning to school the following semester, I mostly forgot about the recordings. But several years later, we dusted the CD, obtained licenses for the cover songs, and in 2007, the album was released digitally.
Follow Through is available at: iTunes // CD Baby // Amazon
