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