John Hendow

This weekend I spent a few hours in the recording studio putting down additional tracks for the 1 Uppers CD project. It’s an interesting process to work on this recording, and one that began with a simple notion. The band was originally started as a project to play classic country songs from the 1950s and 1960s; my good friend Jon Hyde is a wonderful pedal steel player (among his myriad musical talents) and we thought it would be fun to work on this together. We called in some members of his band, and a friend who happens to be phenomenal country guitarist. Harnessing the limitless power of the Internet, we found a local singer interested in the style. Then we put together a list of favorite songs and worked up a few sets of material we could play live. After only a few months the band began to write original music, and our sets rapidly shifted in favor of our own songs. Early this summer we began to record a demo CD of “just a rough recordings of a few tunes”. In classic 1 Upper fashion this blossomed into a full-length multi-track CD project.

The band continues to be a tremendous amount of fun. Playing with the 1 Uppers and The Dudley Manlove Quartet has stimulated a bit of guitar renaissance in my world. I’ve been practicing more styles of music in the last year, and finding new ways to link my guitar playing ideas together. In both bands I’m fortunate to be surrounded by amazing musicians. Every time we get together for practice I find myself bringing home ideas for things to work on. In fact, another great outcome from the 1 Uppers has been all the upgrades on my Telecaster, courtesy of Kris. It’ll be a lot of fun to get this CD completed and pressed. Hopefully we’ll be close to mixdown before the end of the year.