Tag: Imaginary Lines

Imaginary Cube album cover

Twenty Years in the Making

    Ric Albano

Imaginary Cube album cover

Today marks the 20th anniversary of my commencing profession recording music. While out to dinner with my wife Karyn to celebrate her birthday on July 10, 2004, I announced my intention to make a professional record in a professional recording studio, to both her surprise and horror. To mark that fateful occasion two decades ago, I’ve released the culmination of that project, a new Sinclair Soul record entitled Imaginary Cube. This collection features songs written or recorded during that “Imaginary Lines” era, 2004 to 2009, predating Sinclair Soul, but featuring the same core musicians. Imaginary Cube is the first of several compilations that will serve as an epilogue to the Sinclair Soul project, following the release of the final studio album Frequencies last December.

My music career can be logically divided into three phases. The first of these phases started when I was a teenager in the mid 1980s and concluded on December 13, 1996, the day I married Karyn. Up to that point I had been recording volumes of amateur tapes of mostly forgettable songs (although there was an occasional gem) and had very little experience in a professional studio. After I got married, I took a long sabbatical new approach to music. Mainly, I didn’t make much music at all. We had a place in Mountain Top, PA with an upright piano and, every once in a while, I would fiddle around and composed a handful of tunes that were purely instrumental at the time. This was my turn-of-the-century, first “dark age”, which divided the aforementioned first and second phases of my music career.

There was one song during that first dark age which was fully composed with lyrics. In early 1997, we found out that Karyn was pregnant and, during a small family vacation to Virginia Beach, I wrote about a specific day and called it “Twilight of Innocence”, a song specifically about my two present children and the third that was on its way (or so I thought, turned out they were twins). This is the oldest composition on Imaginary Cube (it is actually included as the second movement of the four-part medley “Ocean Suite”) and the only one in this collection composed prior to 2003.

In 2003, I started a job with the Commonwealth Pennsylvania and for a year I commuted to Harrisburg from our home in Drums, Pennsylvania. It was during this time that I started to write lyrics as well as compose full songs. The writing was slow at first, but by mid 2004 I had a solid group of completed songs which ultimately swayed my decision to enter a professional studio. One of these songs was a weird quasi-political tune called “Lorelei”

The music to “Lorelei” was composed during the “first dark age” (with scratch lyrics originally written as “Episode Four”, describing the first Star Wars movie), but the real lyrics were not established until June 2004, the same month my family fully migrated to the Harrisburg area. “Lorelei” is unique in this collection as the final version is a hodge-podge built upon the original 2004 demo (with no rhythm “click” track”) and contains elements recorded in 2004, 2005, 2009, 2018, 2019 and 2024 all recorded in four or five different studios.

Commencing on that fateful July day in 2004, the Imaginary Lines project continued through the rest of the decade, culminating with the release of Imaginary Lines 33 on September 9, 2009. I won’t get into too many details here about the original phase of the project, as I’ve already written extensively about that project in several articles including “My Own Personal Edsel” on this website.

However, there was one final studio session which I include as part of Imaginary Lines. In December 2009, I recorded a trio of songs for possible placement on a multi-artist benefit album that we were producing for Cygnus Wave Records. One of these three, “Song for Diane” featuring vocalist PJ Heckman, landed on the album. The other two, “The Lion” and “The Lamb” met with production issues and both remained unreleased until Imaginary Cube. After this a “second dark age” commenced, which separated the second (Imaginary Lines) and third (Sinclair Soul) phases of my songwriting career.

So let’s fast-forward to Summer 2018. By this time, we had released the initial two Sinclair Soul albums, The Journey and Reflections of Relevance, which each featured a handful of remakes of formally Imaginary Lines tunes. During that summer I began solid plans to record a huge, all-original record with plenty of guest musicians, which became The Good Guys (2019). But before that, decided to once and for all put Imaginary Lines to rest with a compilation of nine updated tracks called Nine Fine Lines. Co-produced with my son Jake, this album was released on September 9, 2018 (the 9th anniversay of Imaginary Lines 33). However, neither of us were ever really happy with the final, rushed product and eventually Nine Fine Lines became the only record that I ever “unpublished” – it is no longer available and those versions of the tunes are archived for the ages. We made plans to once again revisit this in the future, terming that project “The Imaginary Box” as a more comprehensive potential compilation.

Sinclair Soul continued for the next five years with three solid records of new, original music along with two Ric Albano solo records in between (you can check out that entire discography here. Once we decided that the 2023 album Frequencies would be the last new studio record, we started looking into unfinished projects which would act as an epilogue for Sinclair Soul. So it was, this one last pass at Imaginary Lines music.

To accomplish this, I reviewed everything – all the tracks on Imaginary Lines 33 not already re-done and the many unreleased / incomplete song ideas from the decade of the 2000s. In the process “The Imaginary Box” became Imaginary Cube once we settled on 27 tracks (that’s three cubed) for the record. Of those 27 tracks, they were roughly evenly divided into three categories – 1.) the 9 tracks from Nine Fine Lines, 2.) approximately 9 further tracks originally on Imaginary Lines 33 but not included on Nine Fine Lines, and 3.) approximately 9 previously unreleased tracks. Now, I say “approximately” here because Imaginary Cube features two medleys on previously separate tracks. “Phoenix Rising” is a combo of Imaginary Lines 33 tracks “Ashes” and “The Phoenix”, while the massive, four-part, sixteen-plus-minute “Ocean Suite” features three previously released (“The Old Man In the Sea”, “Twilight of Innocence”, “Here On the Beach”) along with the previously unreleased instrumental “The Dawning”. Other previously unreleased tracks in the collection include “Rhymes with Orange”, “I Don’t Want to Live Without It”, “Tunnel Vision”, “Only a Matter of Time”, “Life Is Strange”, “Tres Dolores Por Stig” and “Blues Generation”. Further, some of the updated versions of previously released material also got updated song titles. Check out this Imaginary Songs Matrix for a look at how each song in this collection evolved.

So with the release of Imaginary Cube I can finally now say that, after twenty years, the Imaginary Lines project is finally complete. And now the epilogue phase continues as, beyond this release, we plan on putting together an EP of covers tunes we’ve recorded as well as a new, full length record of “basement tracks” in early 2025. So stay tuned!

~ Ric Albano
 

Edsel

My Own Personal Edsel

    Ric Albano

Edsel

Sometimes when you’re just just a little too close to something, it’s hard to recognize that thing for what it actually is. This is the case. not just for tangible things, but intangible things as well, like works of art.

I’ve been a musician for most of my life, since I was in high school. I’ve been writing songs on a consistent basis since about 1987 or so, and from the beginning I’ve been putting those songs down in some form of recording. Through the late 1980s and into the mid-1990s, I wrote hundreds of songs and recorded them at home on a Fostex four-track cassette recorder. Then, I took a break from music for quite a while, about seven or eight years. In 2003, I decided to buy a new four-track recorder so I could revisit some of my old master tapes and, with the advent of modern digital software, I thought it might be an opportune time to try to refine some of those old recordings and see if I can make something out of them. Unfortunately, this was not possible as they were done in an amateur fashion and no amount of new technology could reverse-engineer the sound quality of the original recordings. They were drenched in nostalgia, but they didn’t have a lot of commercial viability.

So I came up with a crazy idea – why not start from scratch and make new music, I mean a real album! I made this decision in about 2004 and before I went out and recorded in an actual recording studio, I decided to give it one more try at home, making music the way used to. So with some new digital software and computer hardware, I resurrected my old fashioned way of recording – with keyboards, electronic drums and bass guitar. I made a 14 song demo of new material written over that long span of my “retirement” and decided to send it out to some local recording studios. I named this demo “Imaginary Lines” after a loose concept I was working on at the time, thinking I would perhaps create a “concept album” of related songs. Ultimately, very few of those concept songs were retained and I did not stay true to the concept, opting to just make the best album from the best possible songs. So even though the name stuck, the “Imaginary Lines” concept was pretty much blown up from the beginning.

After weighing options for many different studios I decided on Saturation Acres, which was then located outside of Danville, Pennsylvania at the time. The studio was owned by two former members of the rock group The Badlees and, even though this was a bit of a drive to get to the studio, they seem like the most professional and I was very familiar with their past work. So in April 2005 I entered a professional studio as a musician for the first time. Some of the those initial recordings were pure magic, sounding unbelievably good due to the methods they used which I had never practiced before – click tracks, professional drumming, great guitar leads, pitch, rhythm, dynamics, timbre, and texture of the sound. I was very happy with the results I got out of those initial recordings from 2005. In October of that year I released what was meant to be the first of the trilogy of albums cleverly, entitled Imaginary Lines One. Those nine songs on that initial album still we made some of the finest recordings I’ve ever made.

The plan was to record an album each year starting with that first one in 2005, obviously with the second one in 2006. However, here’s where things started to go a little bit awry. After the success for recording of Imaginary Lines One, I spent a lot of time writing music for a follow up but I didn’t have the luxury of cherry picking the best songs from a long prepared demo tape. So everything was pretty much new, as I didn’t want to use any of the songs that had been left off of Imaginary Lines One and wanted to make another album that was of equal quality to that debut. I wrote a lot of songs in 2006 but that was also the year we bought our current house. This was the first of several issues that would arise with the Imaginary Lines project. In 2007, I got back to the studio to record but I was running short on money and short on time. I gave myself a hard deadline to finish it by the end of that calendar year and hence, I ended up releasing a truncated album and I didn’t add any overdubbed guitars it was a very raw strip down collection of songs with piano bass and drums basically and of course lead vocals and I thought this was like a nice counterpart to the rich production of Imaginary Lines One.

So here comes Imaginary Lines II and it’s little more than a dud and I was I didn’t have the enthusiasm to promote this one that I had for the first one. Also, I was increasingly worried that I wouldn’t be able to come up with a third album that would meet the quality of the first or even the second. So, right around this time I decided to change the overall strategy and focus everything into one large compilation album. This would give me an opportunity to fully complete Imaginary Lines II as well as not worry about making a stand-alone third “album” but just adding the best available tracks. So that’s what I did with Imaginary Lines 33, a triple length, two CD album with 33 total tracks. The first disc began with the eight new (“Imaginary Lines 3”) tracks followed by the nine from Imaginary Lines One verbatim and in the original 2005 running order. The second disc included an updated version of Imaginary Lines II as originally envisioned, 16 songs fully produced. I intended to get this all done by 2008 but ultimately it took another year and this international release took place on September 9, 2009.

And so it was that I carried out this new plan with Imaginary Lines 33 and, when released in September 2009, it was more of a relief than a joyous type of feeling of accomplishment. By the end, I was burned out and just wanted to get it done. At the time of its release I was also on another band called Animal Society and we were getting ready to release our own initial album, which we all decided would be something completely different from the Imaginary Lines project. All three of us in that band wrote to an extent and I was relegated to basically sticking to my duties as bass player lead vocalist, trying to give the other two on equal time. We entered the studio in early 2010 and recorded a solid set of songs that I mixed together as an album, but unfortunately we never released it prior to breaking up and I basically commenced a second long break from making music

But I never really stopped writing songs and started conceptualizing plans to make one more album under the name Sinclair Soul name, a name I had used jokingly as an alter-ego throughout my career. There was an issue with the marketing and branding side of things when I coined the term “Imaginary Lines” in 2004 and by the time Imaginary Lines 33 was completed in 2009, a Hollywood based photography company by the same name had pretty much cornered the market on that name in entertainment. So I decided for the final time to coin a name for my musical act (I was never comfortable using my real name), and the (then planned) one and only Sinclair Soul album was to have the grand finale-like name of One More Rock Left to Roll. This was basically to be my retirement album and I wrote plenty of music for it, about 20 songs. I started performing the songs live around 2013 and began plans to record soon after but but that never happened as I faced issues with getting the thing off the ground.

Then something happened in 2016 when, on a whim I decided to buy an acoustic guitar. It had been a long time since I’d been a guitar player and for the entirety of the Imaginary Lines project I was strictly keyboards and bass. But I did buy an acoustic in the summer of 2016 and, unbeknownst to me, this would set things in motion to really get to Sinclair Soul project off the ground. I wrote three acoustic songs in late 2016 early 2017 and planned to record them as a sort of EP. In Spring 2017, I entered the studio for first time in seven years with plans of just recording the three songs.

However, I had so much fun recording that I decided to go a step further and take some of the better Imaginary Lines songs and update them by adding a new guitar lead here, maybe a new piano there, to make each different than they were on the original Imaginary Lines 33. I also turned over mixing and mastering for the first time, giving these songs to a fresh set of ears which proved very beneficial sonically. In the end, I added four new versions songs of classic songs to the three newly composed acoustic songs to forge the unplanned but pleasantly surprising album of The Journey, released in the summer of 2017. Within a year, I decided to do it over again with the same kind of formula for the second Sinclair Soul album, Reflections of Relevance, released in March 2018.

So, here I go with my trilogy idea again as I decide to create one more Sinclair Soul album made solely of updated Imaginary Lines songs – nine more songs to form Nine Fine Lines to coincide with the ninth anniversary of Imaginary Lines 33 with release on September 9, 2018. I re-did each of them, re-named one of them and everything on this new album has either new vocals or new lyrics or a combination of both. This album was mixed by my son Jake Albano, a new audio engineer who I hope to work with many times in the future.

“…and so it Goes curtains on the shell my own personal Edsel is now gone!”

The final line on the final song of Nine Fine Lines says it all; “my own personal Edsel is now gone” Basically, I’m declaring the end of the Imaginary Lines project once and for all. I affectionately call this “my own personal Edsel” because I think that is a good allegory. Obviously, it signifies a huge bust of something once thought to be innovative and great. On the other hand, it also signifies something that’s a little bit special, perhaps a little bit before it’s time little and odd but beautiful in its own way. Today, Edsels are collectors items. They were considered a major bust in 1959 but they are unique in the sense that they persisted some 50 years later.

So that’s basically what Imaginary Lines within the Sinclair Soul canon, with about 20 songs brought forward in full or part to be included in the first three Sinclair Soul albums and will be from this day forward be the official versions of those compositions. The remaining 13 songs, not brought forward to Sinclair Soul, have been gathered and released on a digital-only album called Imaginary Lines 13, available on Bandcamp, with each song pretty much fossilized for posterity as the same as they were in 2009.

This moment obviously marks a big turning point in the music career of myself and the Sinclair Soul project going forward. From now on, all the music will be new and original and a whole new album’s worth of music is already written and is currently being rehearsed with recording starting in December of this year (2018). No breaks this time. It’s simply on with the music!

~ Ric Albano