Album Notes

Noogeez got its start in 2006, when Ken Starratt decided to make a video to enter in Athens, GA's AthFest Sprockets Music+Video Contest.

For the first video, he chose the song "Kathy" by Bob Hay, his bandmate from the 80s Athens band Squalls.

"I chose 'Kathy' for the video," Ken said, "because it has great visual imagery and tells an interesting story. I also thought the song deserved to be recorded, since it never made it onto any of the Squalls' records."

Ken enlisted his son, Jorma to drum on the track and to engineer the recording session, and recruited Bill to play mandolin and banjo. He also brought in Kozmos, who had worked with Jorma in the hip hop project Herb 'n' Skills.

Once the audio was recorded, Ken worked with videographer Safi Khesghi and actress Casey Singson to put together the video.

He entered the video in Sprockets and it won the 2007 Sprockets Audience Choice Award.

In 2008, Noogeez decided their next video would feature "Elephant Radio," another song that Bob wrote. The same group of people worked on it, with the addition of Bob on vocals and guitar. The video was entered in the Sprockets contest and came in 3rd place.

Sprockets did not have video contest in 2009, so the Noogeez decided to concentrate on recording "Galaxy Day," one of Bob's recent compositions.

For this recording, Dave Dowless and Diana Torell joined the group. One factor that particularly energized this session was Bob's fasination with the sounds created by playing the glockenspiel and pennywhistle together, which gives these recordings a unique sound.