I'm very proud to present Scenery's Lady Bird Cassette. It's our first release since 2017's full length Two Stares. While the latter was a sweat-filled summer of partying, love, and loss, Lady Bird is a quieter, more intimate night on the lake.
There's a lot I could say about it, so I'll just say it in bullet form:
- The album cover of this release is very special to me. The photo was taken by my grand-uncle Roland Chatham in 1947. The subject was his girlfriend, my beloved Aunt Catherine, whom we lost in 2016. She was truly a Lady Bird, as she flew airplanes in WWII in an elite women's air group. I love how my talented friend, Bryan Butler, took the photo and brought it together perfectly.
- The title track, Lady Bird, is a story about falling in and out of love in Austin in the late 90s and early 2000s. Back then there used to be impromptu concerts in the middle of the Lamar Street pedestrian bridge. That's what I'm referring to in the chorus when I sing "Meet me on the bridge over Lady Bird and I'll sing you my song." It has since been pointed out to me that Austin's Town Lake wasn't renamed "Lady Bird Lake" until 2007. I think that really just speaks to how our memories and nostalgia can be so wildly approximate, with people, places, and times conflated into a single picture; a single feeling. That's what we tried to do with this song.
- The B-side, Queen of the Night, is also very special to me. When my good friend Elizabeth Lodowski passed away in 2016 her boyfriend gave one of the most moving eulogies I've ever heard. She wrestled with cancer for several years, but they only met a couple of years before she died. This is my best attempt of catching that moment and putting it into a song.
- This is the first album I've put out of my own music that I didn't play a large role in mixing since the passing of my best friend and partner in music, Travis Bannerman. Major props to John Michael Landon at Estuary Studios for mixing the two featured tracks with such skill and care.
- This was also the first time I've employed anyone for mastering except for Travis or the ever-so-talented Tim Gerron. Big shout out to Kevin Butler at Test Tube Audio for last-second mastering that was perfectly crisp and clean.
You can listen below or on Spotify and you can purchase a physical cassette on our bandcamp site.
