STORY/SONG PROJECT

*** Please note that, as this is a work in progress and the songs are unreleased, this is a non-public page accessible only through the link you were provided.

 A couple years ago I wrote and recorded a semi-autobiographical song called "Mariaville." It never became a full-band Jo Henley song; it was just a burst of an idea I had rattling in my head. One day I headed over to my buddy Tim Lynch's studio, The Recording Company. We tracked "Mariaville," and I set it aside.

"Mariaville" never stopped rattling, though. Soon after, when it came time to write stories for my MFA application, I returned to that world, and what poured out was the short story "Silver Arrow." Having felt I'd scratched that story/song itch, I moved on. And yet this fictional world I'd created about the Walsh family kept appearing on my doorstep, so I did what I've always done when the muse comes knocking: I opened the door. I wrote another story about the Walsh family, this time from a different character's point of view and a few years down the road. Then another, and another, eventually spanning five decades and covering each family member's POV. This became the bulk of my output while an MFA student--a series of linked stories, about half of which feature Shane Walsh as the protagonist.

Recently, with the last of the collection's stories finally completed, I have returned to my dream of combining my two passions, songwriting and fiction writing, and am in the process of recording one song for each of the ten stories. These songs are not re-tellings of the stories, but rather are inspired by them: I’ll take the POV of a minor character, for example, or imagine what happens beyond the page.

I don't claim to be the first person to have tackled something like this. But I also don't know anyone who has. The closest I can think of is Willy Vlautin: when I bought my copy of Northline back in the day, it included a companion CD of moody instrumentals he had written and recorded. As a fan of both Vlautin's novels and his band Richmond Fontaine, I found the concept super cool. My approach is similar, except with more traditional songs--song with vocals, not just instrumentals; an album that can be sung along to and cranked in the car and enjoyed independent of the stories. It’s been big fun to reimagine the stories as songs and to create a sonic world for each: a story set in the ’80s has an ’80s vibe; a sad story, a sad song; a country song for a story about a country music deejay; and so on. As I said, BIG fun!

My aim is to finish this album by summer 2023. In the meantime, here's a taste of where I'm going with this story/song project of mine:

-Andy