Hooper "The Pandemic One"

Released October 2020

Wow, TWO releases close to each other? The kid was on FIRE back then!

Well, one of the major reasons for this was of course, being locked in the house for most of the year during COVID. As always, once one release is done, I always seemed to have a number of other ideas floating around in the home studio that I would work on in the meantime. It’s funny, you work so hard on an upcoming release, but by the time you finish for me, It always seems like by then you are almost “bored” with those songs and are eagerly working on what’s next.

After the fire, we were back in the house and since we were subjected to not leaving the house for God knows how long, It gave me ample time to work on a lot of things around the house. What else was I supposed to do right?

We had a complete finished basement, but it was filled to the brim with boxes and boxes from when we moved back so I spent time cleaning everything up, making it nice and set up my own little work/music studio space! I had a nice desk, couches and all of my gear set up so I could sneak down there whenever I wanted.

I was able to work from home (believe it or not, for only 3 months then they sent us back to the office for some reason. They were one of “those companies”) so I would go down there to work, sign off and then I had the rest of the time to pick up the instruments and work on some ideas I had going.

I also decided FINALLY after many releases of singing into an IPad to spend a little money and pick up an actual studio vocal mic and direct box to record my vocal tracks at home. Figured this would save time for the next Critically Ashamed album we could just use those tracks instead of re-recording them at Shawn’s like we did the last time. I was already locked up in quarantine so might as well use the time wisely.

So while the band was in exile I did what I had always done, worked on new songs and demoed a bunch for the next album. I started to discover now with all of this “free time” on my hands and the new equipment these “demos” were starting to sound really, really good!

After a few self recorded releases under my belt I felt I was getting way better with mixing the tracks and of course the actual vocal mic made such a big difference. I was super happy on how these songs were sounding and I felt even the songwriting was getting better. over 2 years of sobriety my head was clear, I was focused and was super proud of the material I put together.

So as I sat at home rotting in “pandemic land” for months and months with no sign of relief in sight I had a lot of time to think about a lot of things. One major being “well, what do I do now with these?”

Being completely transparent and honest, I started to think of the album we just released under the CA name, the experience and how it came out and started to feel a little selfish and precious about this batch of songs and how they came out.

As I mentioned, I was super excited and proud of these songs and how these “demos” came out. I started thinking…

“what if I give these to them and they want to change a bunch of stuff?” I didn’t want to have happen with some of the songs on the CA record where I would cave.

“OK so when are we going to get out of this pandemic?” - By the end of the Summer, these were IMHO done. What now? Do I wait over a year, present to the band, work on them, then record from scratch and wait months, maybe another year to release? It’s one thing to work on your own time, add three others and everyone’s schedules, by the time we actually get to it selfishly, like I said in the beginning, I’ll be bored and onto other ideas.

So, as with some results of life under the COVID regime, I decided to use it to “my advantage”

I basically said to the band “hey look, I have all these songs I did on my own. Who knows when all of this will be over and we will get back to playing, so I am going to release this under my own name and we can get back to business once all of this is over” to which they gave their blessing. Honestly, when it came to this album I wasn’t “asking” as much as “telling” them what I was doing.

So it was wild, The Critically Ashamed album was released in May, then my solo album “Hooper” was released literally 6 months later.

Looking back response wise, it wasn’t like one blew up while the other died on the vine. Both actually performed really well streaming wise. Each single from each album actually were streamed A LOT I guess everyone was stuck home bored as well.

As a matter of fact, the first single from “Hooper” I released called “Burnt” was streamed and played 3x more than any prior single! To this day, this song has been played the most out of any song I have released to this day.

Tack that on with the singles from The Critically Ashamed, although we were not playing live, the songs were getting played a lot, which was great to see.

Looking and listening back to this as well as the CA record, If I am being honest “Hooper” I love way more. If I had to rank any of these albums I’ve released so far, to this day I always tend to put this, or the next one as my favorite. They sounded killer, all of the songs are solid and just as an overall release it tends to be the most consistent.

Not bad for an album cover that was a pic I took as a child of my Sesame Street figures in Brooklyn in the 70’s stealing my mom’s instant camera. Man was she pissed.