Working With Palmer

When I tell the story it sounds like another bit of mythology. When I began putting together “The Soft Ache And The Moon” I fell in love with his playing. I can’t remember the first thing I heard but whatever it was I fell in love with it. I got his number. Numbers aren’t so hard to get. During a cold call I sort of told him we were going to make music together, most likely forever. Shockingly, he was amenable. Today “The Making Of The Soft Ache And The Moon” begins its streaming life. It was also the beginning of our collaboration which has, to date, produced 5 full length albums, a box set of rare and unreleased material. TSAATM is my favorite of my records. I’m fairly sure that will never change. Last week we released our album “Richard Edwards Sings The Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s Songbook” and it broke our first weekend streaming record. We’re kind of always working on something together. A couple weeks ago Dave reached out to see if I had anything cooking. He was fresh off a soundtrack for the Farley comedy “Ricky Stanky” (I have yet to see it) and seemed ready to get back to work. For the first time in forever I don’t really have songs. I mean, I have a few, and I could write more if I wanted to, but for the first time in my life it is not my dominant creative concern. I was finishing the book, putting together these making of box sets, working with the Positively guys on the Rot Gut reissue series and the Songbook 2xLP. I’m weirdly in a place in my life where tending to what I’ve made is of equal importance (I think..) to pumping out more of it. “Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw” always felt like the end of something. Not of everything, but of something. If I were to ever make another record of original songs it would need to be something else. The book is basically the full story of my 30’s which produced those solo records (“Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset”, “Verdugo”, “The Soft Ache And The Moon”, “Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw”, “Sling Shot To Heaven - Director’s Cut”, and “Songbook”. Not a bad decade. If I survive my 4th decade and there was a book about it I’d want it to be a very different book. That’s the goal anyway. So I told him I wasn’t ready to make a record, but hey, I did write a couple movies, something I’ve always done but was always a backseat to music. I’ve long thought the way music in movies works is sort of backwards. A lot of composing to an edit. The films I’ve made have been musical in nature and we cut TO music. So why not do that in non-musical films? So I proposed we begin scoring the script, thinking that doing so would challenge me as I wrote. So we did. And it did. We’re about halfway through the soundtrack and it is as exciting and vital to me as anything we’ve done. Will the movie ever happen? Who knows. It’s good, it’s strange. But if it doesn’t it doesn’t matter that much. There will be a script. There will be a soundtrack album. And it’s another brick in the wall of stuff I’ve been building with a guy who has become my most cherished creative collaborator. So much more could, and no doubt will, be said about the work we’ve made. But for now, here’s “The Other Eye” from our little soundtrack. And you can head over to your favorite evil streamer and put ears on the 37 track Soft Ache Making Of where you can essentially hear the relationship form in real time. Like so many things in my life, pretty neat.

-Richard.