Cult Of Isis

How it happened--Jonathan Donahue, of Mercury Rev fame, had been a champion of Cult Of Isis music since I first started recording tunes on a laptop in my loo in LA and found a little fan following in the Myspace days.
Fast forward through a few headlong plunges into protools where I found out home recording was not my thing, to June 2011. I was playing out alone acoustically and people were asking for a CD. Simple enough. So, J.D. hooked me up with Mike Merenda, of Mike + Ruthy and the Mammals, whose experience with singer-songwriters seemed right on.
My time was slated, just a guitar and a girl, in the studio between Mike’s busy touring schedule when Hurricane Irene hit. Our Catskills’ home was seriously rocked by Mother Nature. The lights were just back on in our wet slowed down world as I drove through still flooded roads hopping with frogs to get to Humble Abode Studios. It was a wild beginning.
I didn’t know where it would all go-- we were recording during the mix time since we’d lost a week to the hurricane. I wondered how Mike and I would work together-- he was rooted in deep traditional Americana and I was being compared to Freak Folk artists when I was singing live. No matter what, I was on for the ride.
It turned out our different aesthetics and adventuresome ears worked well together. By the time the base tracks were down for Mystery & Fealty we were on to something all together more expansive then the original plan. The loop boxes were out as I danced ecstatically around an ancient, damp and buzzing organ and Mike was trying to convince me I’d play every instrument on the album.
In the end, we organically co-produced these songs over the next many months, M.M. filling in the gaps with sounds I wished for, a glockenspiel here, auto-harp there and the all-important drums laid impossibly last over the naturally timed tracks. I was riding the up and down waves of my aural perfectionism vs. the magical “letting it happen” vibes that I love most, trying to split the difference in a way that reflects the intentional while remaining true to how they grew out of the moment. And all the way, Jonathan was still urging and encouraging me onward from the first mix to the final master. Nearly nine months later, these songs are the precocious, sweet and rebel teenage-misfits who wished to be born of that labor.