"WHAT I MEANT TO SAY" - ALBUM CREDITSĪll music composed and arranged by Andrew Callard, except for the bonus track "Eliza (Acapella Version)", arranged for acapella by Andrew Callard, Eric Olsen and Staticflow. I have included the original acapella version of "Eliza" that I recorded with Staticflow in 2003 as a bonus track. I had originally arranged and recorded an acapella version of "Eliza" with a vocal band named Staticflow (composed of myself, Eric Olsen, Jeremy Goldman, Dave Baumgartner, and Lauren McCann) back when I first wrote the song, but I wanted to give it a new feel that fused rich vocal harmonies with instrumentation. Finally, I decided to take a song a named "Eliza" that I had written on the piano in 2003 and create a remix of it that applied doo wop harmonies and an R&B-based drum track, which is the second track on the EP. This song gave us much clearer sense of how we could fuse my love of vocal harmony with the new forms of instrumentation and sampling that I had been exploring. We ended up recording background vocal tracks and applying digital effects to them so that they sounded more like instrumental textures. In the latter case, Sean and I started to experiment with ways I could incorporate my extensive experience singing with acapella groups into my songs. It really took off when I met highly talented spoken word artist and social change agent Osa Obaseki, who wrote and performed the rap which ends the song.Įmpowered to explore the ways in which I could draw from various genres, I wrote a rock ballad laced with hip-hop grooves, "Honesty" (the third track on this EP) and followed it with an upbeat dance track named "Head Over Heels" (the opening track for the EP). The first song I wrote in this stage (and the fourth track on this EP), "Can't Live Without You", was essentially an experiment exploring what would happen if I built a song around overlapping "loops" of short vocal phrases rather than a traditional verse/chorus format. After a couple of months immersing myself in these new genres, I was inspired to write new songs, and these new songs (not surprisingly) reflected the influence of all this immersive listening on my songwriting style. Inspired and excited to see how I might envision my songs in different styles, I went about listening for hours and hours to contemporary artists in the Electronic music genre and familiarizing myself with techniques such as looping and sampling that were key aspects of their sound, but ones I had rarely used as a songwriter. This was exactly the kind of collaborative partnership I had envisioned when I had first conceived of the album years before. He also offered to record these new songs in his home studio, which was conveniently located right across the street from my apartment building. After Sean heard some of my original songs, he suggested that I consider doing "remixes" of them, incorporating aspects of genres such as R&B, indie rock, and Electronic music that would give me an opportunity to imagine them in fresh, new ways. Then, in October of 2013, I met Sean McVey, a talented drummer and music producer, at a party geared towards local musicians. For five years, I put off the album idea and pursued other musical projects.
I also felt that the style in which I was playing the songs was more an imitation of piano-based songwriters I had ilstened to growing up (such as Elton John and Billy Joel) than it was a true expression of my inner muse. Since I had written all my songs on the piano and usually performed them solo with piano, as opposed to with a band, I didn't at that time have a clear sense of how I wanted to record them in with other instruments. I knew that I wanted to produce an album of original music I had written, but I wanted to do it organically, in collaborative fashion with someone, rather than simply hiring studio musicians to lay down tracks for me. The idea for this album began in 2008 after a particularly generative songwriting period.
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