We posted last week with news about The Chapmans signing with Compass Records. At that time, we promised some more details on their next CD soon, and Jeremy Chapman has provided us with just that…
“Grown Up (A Revisionist History) is a special 20th Anniversary project that revisits some of the material that the band recorded early in our history. Rather than re-release the original versions on a compilation CD, we picked some of our favorite songs, threw away everything we knew about them, and started from scratch on arrangements, solos, vocals, and production ideas (the revisionist history part). The songs had very limited exposure originally being on self released projects, a few of which were only released on cassette tapes when we were first starting out.
We really wanted to have the CD representative of The Chapmans as an anniversary project, so we decided to produce it ourselves. That way we felt the music and song selection was really all about where we were as a band, while revisiting our history. We made sure to include a few songs that we had written as kids, we recorded all of our tracks in our home studio, and designed all the artwork on the CD packaging ourselves. So a big part of our goal for the CD was for it to embody the strengths that we had developed over the last 20 years of performing, musically and otherwise.
A few highlights for us included having Rhonda Vincent sing a duet with John on the CD, something we had talked about for a while. We were all blown away to have Noam Pikelny play banjo on El Cumbanchero, which he completely nailed. And of course we could never say enough about what Rob Ickes and Stuart Duncan bring to the project.”
We’ve also posted previously about the music video The Chapmans have produced for the song Bubble Gum Baby, which will be released in tandem with the new CD. Here’s the video teaser they created in October.
Grown Up (A Revisionist History) is scheduled for a February 2010 release.
