"Salt (Felted Piano Version)"

I'm extremely pleased to report that my new single, Salt (Felted Piano Version) was released this morning and is now downloadable/streamable in pretty much any of the places where one can listen to music. It's a re-imagining of a song of mine that's always been pretty special to me, and I don't think I've ever been happier with the sound of one of my recordings.

 You can listen here:
Bandcamp/ Spotify/ Apple Music/ Pandora

But here's how it was made! In the winter of 2020, my friend Kevin Harper and I spent a few days holed up at his studio in Nashville, wiring his upright piano up with a fleet of different microphones and trying to see how many interesting sounds we could pull out of it. We put some mics right up against the hammers and wippens, and aimed others at the pedal mechanisms, the soundboard, the back of the piano, the top of the piano, the room around the piano, and pretty much everything else we could think of. We were interested in capturing a sense of what a crazy machine a piano is: this elaborate convolution of wood and wire that can only manufacture its characteristically pure and simple-sounding tones through an intricate and wildly complex set of mechanical processes.

For this track, a new performance of the title track from my 2017 album "Salt," we went even further, draping a thick sheet of felt between the hammers and strings. The felt muted the sound of the notes themselves just a bit, opening more space for the mechanical piano sounds we were listening for: the thwack of the hammers; the creak of the pedals; the snap of each wippen and jack; the overringing of certain strings; my own weird breathing and limbs banging around. It made the song feel more physical, tactile, and raw to us, and more like the way I'd always heard it in my head.

The song was mixed by another friend of mine, Harris Paseltiner, who plays in the band Darlingside (you should check out their new single too while you're at this). He immediately understood exactly what we were trying to do with all these piano noises and enthusiastically threw himself into the project right away. He and I then spent dozens of hours on Zoom calls talking through this one song, phrase by phrase, during which he slowly shaped it into exactly the record we were hoping for: in his final mix, you can hear these big, broad clouds of tones floating up from a churning, percussive set of intensely physical actions — both mine and the piano's — and that's exactly what I wanted the song to feel like when I wrote it. In a lot of ways, "Salt" is fundamentally a song about trying to get out from inside your own head, and it feels oddly perfect to have a recording of it that almost sounds like you're listening from deep within the piano itself.

I'm psyched about how this came out; of the music I've recorded to date, I think it may offer the best representation of the things that attract me to playing and writing for this extremely cool instrument, and I'm glad I can finally share it with you. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed working on it.

Thanks, everybody. Please enjoy the new single -- and please share it around if you do! -- and I hope you're all doing okay out there. See you soon.

Yours,
Ben