As you’ve probably heard, our new live album, LIVE in MMXXV, is being released to streaming services Friday morning, and we’re playing a live show (natch) at Crosstown Brewing that night. While this is the first live album I’ve released with The Monday Night Card, the very first full album release I ever put out with a band was a live album we called Das Boot (both a reference to the 1981 German submarine film of the same name, as well as a play on the term “bootleg.” We thought this was uproariously funny, by the way…) by my Kansas City group Hobson’s Choice, which later became Resident Clark (because we found out a band in Australia was using the name Hobson’s Choice. A quick Spotify search tells me there are at least three bands called Hobson’s Choice).

I was in my early twenties, we had a tight three-piece band, a dozen songs we’d rehearsed really well, and a gig at the storied Davie’s Uptown Rambler’s Club. Since we didn’t have any other recordings to use to book gigs, we thought we’d record our first real show and release it as an album.

The funny thing about doing this in 1998 was that to record a “live album” we had to hire a mobile recording studio, which was a hollowed-out Econoline van full of recording equipment that we paid a not-insubstantial amount of money to hook up via cable to microphones in the back of the room where we were performing. In that way, it was very much like a bootleg, in that there was no way for us to mix individual tracks (like bringing up the guitar, the bass, the kick drum… you get the idea). The result: a recording of exactly what the people heard that night.

We were pretty proud of it, sold some to our friends and family, and indeed used it as a calling card to book other shows. The really funny thing is that you can now easily get a superior-sounding “live” recording on the phone you carry in your pocket. Wild.

The album we're releasing Friday, however, was a multi-track recording that we got to mix like a studio album. We kept the guitars loud in the mix, so the vocals have to fight the instruments a little, and the result is quite a bit edgier and more raucous than any of our studio recordings. We can’t wait for you to hear it and hope you’ll mix it into your playlists.

As always, thanks for listening—and (if you made it this far…) reading!