LOUISE MESSENGER
The Monday Recording Club - Louise Messenger & The London Dance Orchestra
The pandemic affected all of us in a lot of ways, but the hardest part for me was not being able to connect musically with the people I love making music with most in the world.
As restrictions gradually lifted across the UK, we were allowed to finally rehearse together again, and this album was recorded during this strange in-between time.
These 9 songs are the result of these sessions, recorded old school - live and in the same room. The result is a combination of some of our favourite swing tunes and ballads.
The Louise Messenger Quartet - Australian Edition!
These 8 songs were recorded in mid 2017 in the last week before I left Australia to move to the UK, and features my favourite Australian rhythm section - David McEvoy, Sam Riley and Ben Riley. In the decade we played together, we played hundreds of gigs together.
The day we went into the studio was almost unplanned, we wanted to call it like a gig. Dave reminded me the night before we went in to the studio that we had written a tune together a year or two prior - I got up at 7am and jotted down some lyrics and it became Falling In Love Again. Waiting had been penned in the couple of weeks previous and I went in with a sketch chart of what I thought the chords should be.
Hope you enjoy this snapshot.
Thanks to the wonderful James Brown and Jarrad Payne at Wizardtone for recording this, and sending me over mixes and being patient while I tried to find wifi in the middle of rural Uganda so I could listen to it with headphones taken from a budget plane company (and that in itself is another story!)