Pete Morse ought to be on a poster somewhere. He makes all this creative economy talk almost make sense. After graduating Skidmore with a BA in music in 2003, he needed a place to set down roots and open his own recording studio to ply his trade as a recording engineer and producer.
He and co-conspirator Charlie Kitchings met up in Brooksville, Maine, after growing up together in Connecticut and separating for college. They had an idea they’d hang out for the summer, record an album, see what happened. The result is Backroads for Tomorrow and the duo’s debut album, Before the Bridge Breaks, an interesting amalgam of Sufjan Stevens, Squeeze, and John Mayer. Further, after getting a taste for the state and its cultural hub, Portland, Morse decided Maine might not be a bad place to set up his recording studio; his Freeport-based Busted Barn opened in the summer of last year.
“When we decided to come up here and record the albums we really fell in love with it,” Morse says. “I didn’t want to do Boston or New York. Portland was artsy and had a good scene. I thought it would be a real good fit.”
So here he is, trying to push an album, get folks to come in for $40-per-hour recording time, and generally contribute to the creative economy.
The album he and Kitchings have produced — there’s another recorded and ready to roll thanks to a second summer’s time in Deer Isle — is a decent advertisement for his production skills. Kitchings is now married with kids and living in Washington (the state), so this isn’t going to turn into a touring thing. Hence the reluctance on Artemis Records’ part to sign the band, though they did get in front of some people. Gone are the days when a label might take a flyer on a studio act like Steely Dan. The money’s in the touring now; the album itself is a loss leader.
Not that recording Before the Bridge Breaks was lost time. Morse, who plays all the guitars, banjo, and bass on the disc, was helped by session players in Jim Chapdelaine’s West Hartford, Connecticut, studio when it came time to polish the album for release, but it still carries his imprint.
Kitchings, who handles all the vocals here, “would write the basic songs and put lyrics to them,” says Morse, “and then I’d form it into a song, add choruses, change things that weren’t working.” Once the form was outlined, Morse would start laying in tracks.
“I have this idea,” he says, “that every instrument is a little character who comes into the song and does his part. Sometimes they come in for just a few seconds and you never hear from them again. So, in the end, you have a little community of instruments all working together.”
