Richard Medek

My friend Atom and I call this the “doopy doop” song — it’s one of my favorites. Teddy Morgan produced this song in his Barrio East studio here in Nashville, and it’ll (hopefully) appear one day on his next record.

I co-wrote a bit of this and that’s also me pecking at the keyboard…thirty or so takes and it was nailed.

Teddy and I recorded this song on his last record, Freight. After playing it live for some time it morphed into something else altogether, so we were both pretty excited about laying it down again.

We recorded this version live and on-the-fly, just drums and guitar, straight to 2” tape with a few overdubs added later.

Winthorp is a little side project with Carl Broemel and Teddy Morgan on various instruments and special guests…this tune has Bo Koster from My Morning Jacket on the B3. It starts off with a little space-jam thing and ends up turning into a crazy little dance number, or something. Whatever it does, I like it.

The interesting thing about this record is that Kelly and I tracked it, for the most part, with him on acoustic guitar in the same room as me, or in the neighboring not-so-much-soundproofing-control room. And Kelly sings really, really (really) soft, so I had to play very quiet. There are songs on this record where I’m playing with my fingers.

So even though this tune is sort of a rocker, I’m hitting my drums from about 3 inches away. It was really challenging but really fun.

This song of Kelly’s has been around for years…we started playing it on tour throughout Europe, where it found it’s way to Kelly’s Live In Europe album. It got so much attention we couldn’t resist the challenge of recreating (and beating) the energy of it on Brand New Bag. I’m very proud of how the choruses take off and fade away…I’m a total sucker for that sort of thing.

Here’s a mix from Jon Coleman’s upcoming record Make it Fast. I’m a sucker for this lazy, soulful kind of groove…check out more of Jon’s new record on his website, http://joncolemanmusic.com.

This is one of my favorite tunes from Cathy River’s latest Little Black Cloud project. “So Far Gone” is the only song I know that combines romance, despair, and string theory. We recorded this at Wavelab Studio in Tucson, AZ…there are some pretty cool moments here along with some guest piano tinkling by Howe Gelb.