Light Up The Sky is a culmination of five different recording studios and four different engineers (one of whom mastered the album). I borrowed players from my former rock band Searchlights, and my former folk band The Tummybuckles. What began as a series of regular Thursday recording sessions in Portland Oregon with my favorite Engineer of all time Ryan Ferris, for fun in 2009, began taking shape as a cohesive album over the next two years. Almost five years in the making! Since the release of Searchlights in Mexico (2008), fan support for my solo work has been unexpectedly overwhelming. With the encouragement of loyal friends and collaborators Ryan Ferris, Kris Farm, and Russ Rochambeau, I continued to pursue studio recordings on my own, alongside all my running projects: Huge Sally, A Crab's Life, Idiot Science, The Tummybuckles, and Searchlights. Searchlights in Mexico was done at Jackpot Recording Studios (Portland) in the span of a week (three days tracking, four days mixing). Light Up The Sky was done in a variety of studios, with a variety of players, and over three years, eventually pairing down to an album. Light Up is more all-encompassing, and ambitious, than the crafty-stylized-experiemental S.i.M., and to my taste, just as intimidating to share with everyone. Over the past three years, many of these songs have been performed with the various projects, but there are a few that have not been heard widely yet. The earliest track to be laid down and finalized was "Good Fortune" from 2009, which I recorded with Ryan and which kicked off the whole Solo Album idea once again. The most recent is "The Righter", written AND recorded in the summer of 2013 at Waverley Studios (my home studio).