Album Notes

Of all the acts I've seen, I've never been so inspired after a show as to immediately write a review months before I'd even had a place to publish it.

When I got home from watching Christopher Jak and his band at Archer's last month, I was in awe. I wrote two pages about how this pop/folk band was going to break the scene wide open. It wasn't that one beer talking. Nor was it the second. It was the thought that the next John Mayer or Pete Yorn was playing in my hometown to nobody on a weekday. Somebody's got to bust him out of here. Why has nobody heard of this guy?

It wasn't loud rocking rhythms and screaming guitars. It was chill living room music with a reading lamp and an Oriental rug against the backdrop of an evening cityscape. And, the lamp and rug were only in my mind. There was something about the ambiance created by the players. The audience was welcome. At home. My only regret was I couldn't take the music home and listen to it again. Not then.

In the recording process, he has cut no corners. "I brought in a lot of great players," says Jak. "Jason from Big Black Cadillac is on bass, he's just a fantastic player; Ross Martin played guitar on a lot of stuff; Mark Raines did about half of the drums, he's a great jazz drummer from Denver; Brian McRae, the former drummer from the Freddie Jones Band did the really rockin' drums."

Jak jokes, "It's pretty self indulgent. There's really nothing more like sonic masturbation than having your song backed by a big string symphony. We brought in strings and wrote the parts--basically had a quartet set up and then looped them over."

Jeremy Lawton produced the album. "He's really the guy for mixing and producing around here. We just had a ball. I wanted to strangle him several times; he was ready to never work with me again several times. It was really great."

He has been singing since childhood, and playing guitar since high school. "When I was a kid I was in a professional boy choir, we toured a lot of the year and did shows at Carnegie Hall with the NY Phil . We were always out there with the symphony guys, and they would all say the same thing, don't stay in music unless there is nothing else that you are capable of doing."

"I would pick it up for a while, and then let it fall away for a few years. I didn't see a clear path. And, sometimes you just don't want to mill around. But, you don't know where to go next. So, you do something else," he says.

This time it's only picking up. There is no more falling way.

-TIM HANAUER, SCENE MAGAZINE