Album Notes

"Electric Color Bars & Diamond Dreams" started out as a mission to get some musical friends together to help record a couple of songs. The recordings would follow up the 4-track recorded albums of "Live From the Kitchen" and "After the Fire", both released in 2003. Once some time was booked at Take Root Recording in San Francisco, a couple of songs quickly developed in to a full album. The engineers were welcoming to everyone and helped make the entire process a lot of fun. Jonathan Mayer, an experienced engineer and drummer would end up drumming for the sessions and would prove to be instrumental in holding the group together. The lead guitar player (playing the "Red Delight" on the album cover) is Billy Mungovan, who has been playing music with James since their college days at the University of New Hampshire. The bass player is Damian Parkington, who happened to be "passing through" California on his way from Austin to Cape Cod at the time of the recordings. Sean O'Malley (of the LA based band, Waveland) made the trip to San Francisco to sing harmonies. To give a cohesive feeling to the songs, they were recorded in a live setup - with vocals, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass and drums played together. After several days at Take Root through the spring and summer of 2004, the end result was "Electric Color Bars & Diamond Dreams" - a dream come true for James Parkington to share his music and a collection of songs that longs to be heard traveling on any highway.