New Music: Scenery's "Lady Bird" Cassette Now Available!

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. 

Announcing Scenery's new LP, Two Stares - Out Jan 6th, 2017

I'm so excited to share what my friends and I in Scenery have been working on for the last year. May we present Scenery's first full-length record, Two Stares. While there will be lots of sights and sounds to share in the next two months, here's the basic info along with the album cover (designed by my good buddy Bryan Butler):

Scenery - Two Stares
Release show/party: Sat 12/3/16 @ Cheer Up Charlie's in Austin, TX
Release date: Fri 1/6/17 on Spotify, Apple Music, and Bandcamp

Produced by Scenery
Mastered by Timothy Gerron
Album Art by Bryan Butler

Physical CD copies can be preordered here in December and will ship 1/2/17. But, of course, they will also be available at our live performances, including the 12/3/16 release party.

Press release:
Austin synth rock band Scenery is proud to announce the release of their first full-length album, Two Stares. It will be available the first week of 2017. Having been a band just under two years, this collection of Austin music veterans has already cultivated an avid following through their electric live performances.
Two Stares is a collection of 11 songs that reflect on being young, growing up, not being young anymore, and yet somehow still being young. Vocalist Richard Kentopp recalls stories of long drives, sneaking into the woods, being an angry drunk, and fires on the beach. Underneath the idyllic pictures of days gone by, the rhythm section of Shane Wood (bass) and Austin Hegarty (drums) pound out their tightly angular grooves. Dean Stafford douses the sound with swirling guitars while Ali Sanders tops everything off with lush keyboards and vocals.
It all comes together in Two Stares, leading the listener to believe that no matter how old they are the stories of the young can still move their body and heart.

New Music Video: Scenery - "For the Record"

You can view my band Scenery's new video here or on Facebook.
We shot it with an Iphone 5 on the VHS Camp app. I edited it on Final Cut Pro using the multi-cam clip feature. Overall we spent about 10 hours and less than $20 on this gritty little piece. Enjoy!