Zach Pietrini is beaming with excitement for what’s in store in the year ahead. The Milwaukee singer-songwriter and band leader is planning to perform as much as he can in the months ahead—including at South by Southwest—and to get into the studio at some point to record a new album.
But before that, he’ll mark the “end of a chapter” of the Zach Pietrini Band, with the release of new EP Denver Sessions (B-Sides). It features an assortment of unused songs, many of which didn’t make the cut for his 2017 release Holding onto Ghosts.
It’s a collection of music made for and courtesy of his loyal fanbase. Pietrini and his band were barely out of the studio recording Ghosts when a fan named Kevin offered to fly them out to Denver to record in a studio there. The fan was studying in school to be a music engineer and had a connection at Side 3 Studios in Denver.
“Literally the week after we got out of the studio, a guy who is a mutual friend and a fan of our music basically offered us a trip out to Colorado,” Pietrini says. “First, it started as just me. And then it turned out he was ‘No, let’s get the whole band. We’ll do a 20-hour session. I’ll get you time at the studio.’ He just gifted us this thing.”
Pietrini began looking through his notes and demos to see what music he had available. Some were nearly complete while others were rough sketches of songs.
“I had a couple weeks to basically chart out a bunch of music and get some ideas down,” he says. “When choosing songs [for Ghosts], it’s not like I said, ‘These 6-7 songs are junk.’ I really believed in these songs. They’re part of me like most of my music is. A lot of it is me making sense of life.
|
|
“Sometimes you don’t have a place to use them, but you really enjoy them. It can be very frustrating,” he continues. “The reason I wanted these tunes was that I really believed in what they were by themselves.”
The band flew out to Denver for three days and spent two of them recording in the studio. Pietrini shared production duties with Zach Meyer, who had produced Ghosts.
“Zach is very talented and has a good ear,” Pietrini says. “He knows the stuff because he was in the studio for Holding onto Ghosts before that. The hardest part of recording is finding someone you can let your guard down, and they understand your sound because they’ve been living in it. But I can with Zach. It was a natural extension, where it was like, ‘Hey, we finished this one project, do you want to jump on this next one with us?’”
While the Denver Sessions songs aren’t as connected as the ones on Ghosts, they have a more varied sound.
“Americana can go in many different sonic directions. For the Denver Sessions, I took more advantage of that where it wasn’t bogged down by keeping everything in one family,” Pietrini says. “I felt like I picked and chose between parts of that genre I liked best. Though it sounds closer to Holding onto Ghosts than what the next album will sound like. It’s in the in-between space where some of it is channeling that old country sound, with new rock sensibilities. It dived into rockier, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen territory.”
Ultimately, Pietrini feels it helped that they were operating out of “abundance instead of shortage.” They didn’t feel the strain of a typical recording opportunity where it was “oh shoot, we got to get through this because it’s our one shot.”
Instead, there was a relaxed feeling since this was an opportunity that came out of generosity. Anything that came out of it would be a bonus. He hopes this puts them ahead for the next record.
“Some of our biggest expenses are recording,” he says. “So, you usually start in the hole pretty far and then you hope that you can make it back. For this one, we didn’t have it hanging over our head. Everything we make from that is going to go back into making the next record, and hopefully we’ll be starting out with a really nice budget. I’m hoping to get to the point where enough of the money we’re making from people liking and supporting our music just goes back into making more.”
The Zach Pietrini Band will play release shows for Denver Sessions (B-Sides) at Twisted Path Distillery on Friday, Jan. 11, and Saturday, Jan. 12.
