I’m very pleased to announce that the day has finally come, Tristen’s long awaited, and much anticipated full length LP, Charlatans at the Garden Gate, has been released to the masses. Unfortunately, due to insane weather in the South-East, the physical release date has been bumped to February 15th but the album is still available via pre-order through American Myth Records. I’ve been personally involved in this project myself for over 2 years as it was recorded by Jeremy Ferguson in the studio that he and I own called Battle Tapes Recording. To honor this momentous occasion I had him write a bit about how he came to be involved in making Charlatans at the Garden Gate.
Like most people, the first time I heard Tristen sing one of her songs, I thought “She is going to be huge.” I think I even said that to whomever I was standing next to at the Mercy Lounge, here in Nashville, Tennessee that night. Tristen was playing with another artist who I was working with at the time and, honestly, I hadn’t even heard of her. By the second song, I wondered which slick Nashville producer was already trying to turn Tristen into the next Haley Swift of Kings of Pigg; not thinking that no one was even really actively working with her at that point. But, I was a fan, none-the-less, and wanted to get her in the studio to sing on the album I was trying to finish up. She agreed and arrived promptly to her first session, well before the artist/band and we got the chance to talk for a while. I don’t remember how it came about but we made plans to work on a song recording together later that week. When the time came, she brought a song called “Matchstick Murder” and I was hooked.
Unlike most bands or artists I work with, things kind of just started going with Tristen without much planning other than “Let’s record on this day.” Tristen didn’t really have a steady band, usually relying on pick-up musicians or friends to fill out her songs live so we typically tracked a guide vocal and guitar or keyboard instrument to a click track, knowing that we were going to overdub everything else after we found the “right” players. We compiled an impressive list of songs doing just that and, whenever possible, trying out drummers or pianists, organists, guitarists, horn players, string players, and even some bluegrass instrumentalists. It was a dizzying dance but one that spelled one thing very clearly: Tristen was not going to accept something she wasn’t in love with on her album. This can be a frustrating realization when you come across someone as focused as Tristen became or it can be like a warm blanket, letting you know that, if it’s not muted or erased, you’ve got your ingredients to make the artist’s vision of the song (Or at least the artist’s vision at that particular moment… Those of us who do this enough realize no one will ever be completely happy with their creation forever… And, if they are, you can probably discount them as unimaginative or a Beatle).
So, in the end, the album took around two years to make. We went through probably two albums’ worth of material in that time, had around as many guest musicians on the album as any I’ve done before, finished versions of the songs for tour releases, mixed an album’s worth of home demos Tristen had done on her own, Tristen toured and wrote and wrote and wrote, I spent whole months away from the album making other records while Tristen waited to get back in the studio, and we took our time to do it right.
Against the imaginations of those who have never really labored over a record for longer than the few weekends they could get off from work, we finished Charlatans At The Garden Gate and, today, it’s available on all the normal digital medias (cd, download, hologram field ray) and, my preffered format, vinyl. Through the years, Tristen also worked on finding a visual representation of the music for her album art and was fortunate enough to have painter Julia Martin give her an amazing album cover. It looks especially beautiful nice and large on the vinyl edition, which also sounds as rich as the packaging makes it seem that it would be. Sterling in NYC did the plating and, after a replate (again, Tristen’s quality control ear unhappy with the initial pressing), I can feel that I’m still being modest when I say how fantastic it sounds.
Charlatans At The Garden Gate was a labor of love and it introduced me to one of the people I consider to be a close friend now, one of my favorite songwriters that I’ve had the pleasure of working with, and definitely one of my favorite female voices; Tristen.
