Meridian – Aging Truths

“I’ve spent the majority of my musical lifetime playing in punk rock bands, and continue to do so to this day. The songs that comprise this record didn’t fit in anything else I had going, so other than occasional living-room solo acoustic shows, they didn’t exist anywhere except in the form of tinny laptop-microphone demos. After several years of resolving (and then failing) to make a real record every few months, I finally managed to get it together in March of 2012.

“Aging Truths” is a collection of songs that were written from 2008-2011. Most of these songs were initially recorded on an internal laptop microphone perched on a beer-stained table in a cold Cleveland Heights apartment throughout that four-year period. These demo versions of various songs are still floating around online and can be found pretty easily, though I won’t link them here because I’m semi-embarrassed of them (and these versions sound about 1000x better).

Initially, 12 songs were tracked at Bad Racket Recording Studio in Ohio City, using an acoustic guitar and an in-ear metronome (which bleeds through on a few songs, keep an ear out for it). One of those songs was scrapped before it got any further. On top of those initial acoustic skeleton tracks, Jake, Steve and I added drums, bass, electric guitar, banjo, keys, piano and whatever else we could find to the other 11, 10 of which ended up making the record.

Vocals were another story altogether. A month prior to recording, I had a pretty serious surgical procedure done, a process which resulted in a gnarly post-surgery sinus infection. When the time came to track vocals, I still really hadn’t healed completely…but there were only two days left, and things had to get done. Through what had to have been hundreds of takes, we managed to clip together an album’s worth of vocals. Moral of the story: don’t get otolaryngological surgery and expect to be a songbird four weeks later.

Some mixing took place at Bad Racket, but mostly in San Francisco, California on Adam’s home setup. This was the last record he tracked before he moved out west and I’m so glad to have been able to work with him once more before he took off. Adam, you are a gentleman and a scholar with a golden set of ears.

Huge thanks go out to:

– My brother Jake Stern for agreeing to be part of this project from the get-go. I look forward to making more music with him in the future.

– Adam Wagner for being endlessly patient and dedicated to making my songs sound far better than they actually are

– Steve Gibson for providing a rhythm section that brought some of these songs to life

– Adam Boose for the lighting-fast, kick-ass mastering job

That’s the story. This is “Aging Truths”. It’s free. Go download it, or buy it if you want to. Thanks for listening. -max