Album Notes

The East Side Players were in their heyday in the late 1980s in early 1990s, doing the neverending grind that is the lot of a hot local band in Montreal.

It was more than a job, of course, it was our life and we gave it all we got not knowing that all we would ever really get was the experience of playing together as one and making our own brand of blues rock. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
But when the music was finally over, they did turn out the lights and that was that. No albums, no record of any kind of those ten frenetic years of blood, sweat and tears. Or so I thought until one day in the summer of 2010 when I happened on some tapes (remember them?) we had made here and there as we tried to capture the music that meant so much to us. Maybe the music hadn’t died after all.

I gathered the tapes with any notes I had scattered about in the hope that they could be digitized and that we would finally make the album that never was. Imagine my surprise when what I had found turned out to be exactly right on the money, sound-wise and time-wise, too.

So the ESP is not just an acronym for East Side Players, it’s also a nod to the extra-sensory perception we must have had when we had the sense in all the madness to get it down on tape so that we could make the music happen again.
I hope you find, like I did, that it was well worth the wait.