During third-year university, over Christmas break, Ben Thede went home for the holidays and abruptly decided not to return. We’d been living together and still writing a lot of new music, but now that era was sadly over. I started to work on my own solo stuff now—wrestling with a name for years until “We Shout Fire” kind of struck me in the back of a Jordanian cab—and recorded everything myself using just Garage Band and a very old dynamic mic I borrowed from my Mom. After graduating in 2009, Alana and I moved to Sakaka, Al-Jouf, in northern Saudi Arabia for a two-year teaching contract. We had our own rather sizable house with a yard, pool, and three-bedrooms, which meant I was able to set up my very own studio to record in one of the spare rooms. This was a very DIY and lo-fi affair with my single mic cradled in a stand made using a bent wire hanger, and then a mattress propped up on its side to muffle noises. However, at that time I was absolutely obsessed with artists like Phil Elverum and Conor Oberst who had like vacuum cleaners in the background and other raw qualities to their work that I began to see as a fascinating subversive counterpoint to slick over-produced mainstream music. To this day if you listen to my songs you can hear chairs squeaking, garbage trucks rumbling and many a seagull squawking in some tracks that just are part of the song now.

Over those two years, I would become close friends with a colleague named Dave Knudsen. He had been spent his life largely on the road, working jobs as a master-diver or ESL teacher to earn money, and then going on incredible globe-trotting adventures. He was also a recording artist known as Jaggedy Kaye with an impressive number of records to his name and some radio play in the US. I remember being spellbound listening to him play and tell great stories from his travel and studio experiences. His profound influence on my musical journey cannot be understated. He gave me all sorts of recording and arrangement tips that broadened my studio tool kit quite a bit. But most importantly, he introduced me to the ukulele. At that point, I had been lugging my massive guitar and its unwieldy case through airport terminals and bus stations, but the uke—or “very small guitar” as most people around the world called it—could fit in my backpack and be taken anywhere. I fell in love with the uke instantly, and so Dave with his great wisdom and generosity gave me his uke to keep when we went our separate ways. Now I have 3 of them, which I used to record my greatest album, Vaya Con Dios, a few years later. Without Dave, none of that would have ever existed.

So during those two years in the desert, Dave suggested doing an album together as a way to pass the time. We chose to name ourselves The Mutawa, after the notorious KSA religious police, and the album “2 Haraams Don’t Make A Right”. In Arabic “haraam” means “forbidden”, making this a pretty stellar bilingual pun that Dave thought of. The artwork for the album was done by another coworker and extremely talented photographer/filmmaker from Toronto, Andrew Jehan. Andrew’s brilliant cover shows us standing in front of the armed guards near our compound and hiding our instruments behind our backs because they were also banned at the time by the most restrictive members of society. For some on the stricter side of the Islamic spectrum, there should be no music, just things like prayer calls. Most of the population did not take that too seriously as music of all kinds was common, but technically it was all “haraam” and the police would harass you for that if they heard it. Beside the cover art, Andrew would eventually produce a striking video for one of my future tracks on the Vaya Con Dios album.

To make the album even more of a communal work, we would invite everyone else on the compound over to sing in the studio as a make-shift choir, and layered that into most of the songs at some point. That ended up being so fun that we started to have regular karaoke-style events as well in order to keep the choir alive.

And so over those two years, Dave and I would slowly begin to chip away at this shared album, agonizing over what covers and originals to include and how we wanted to record it. Eventually, we settled on this track list:
1. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Wilco)
2. Ripple (The Grateful Dead)
3. How Deep Is Your Love (The Bee Gees)
4. Heart Around the Wheel (Dave Knudsen)
5. Thoughts Were Thought (Craig Ringrose)
6. End of the World (Herman’s Hermits)
7. Honeymoon Suite (Craig Ringrose)
8. The Magic Sun (Dave Knudsen)
9. Feeling Good (Nina Simone)
10. Four Strong Winds (Neil Young)

We started off with a fairly faithful version of one of my favourite Wilco tracks. We recorded it on ukelele and mandolin, then added my little lightning bolt guitar solos. Next comes Dave’s first choice, a warm cover of Ripple that was really elevated by the choir. I felt the Bee Gees should go next, and remember having a devil of a time nailing that guitar, but I’m glad I did because the choir once again gives the track a huge amount of personality and colour. I also experimented with having overlapping solos in that song, a technique that I was playing around with a lot in those times and continues to feel like my signature approach even today. Dave now gets his first original piece, a very cute little ukulele track written about his playful young relatives. My first original, Thoughts Were Thought, was about a misunderstanding at a party I had had in university. However, the final ending where I spit out a hard “b-word” felt mean-spirited and shameful almost as soon as I recorded it, which is why I cut it out years later and made some other arrangement updates to the track before releasing the far-better version on Atavism. I’ve included the remastered version here. Next, Dave picked this melancholy Herman’s Hermits classic that is also one of my favourites, and the choir really stepped up on this one as well. Our reverb-drenched backing track occasionally stumbles a bit but beside that it really turned out quite nicely. Next up was a track I wrote for my aunt and uncle’s anniversary, and eventually included on Vaya Con Dios. I always thought the cascading call-and-response mandolin on the chorus was quite arresting, and made the recording really shimmer. Dave’s second original is next, a gorgeous, magical uke track that feels like it ends too soon. My last cover was this eerie and shadowy Nina Simone selection that turned out just okay, and made me wish I had more vocal range to really do it justice. Lastly, a Neil Young cover with the whole choir there to support us throughout. I intentionally left the conversations picked up on the mics in the track at the end to remind us of the warmth and laughter that we shared in that tough-to-survive place. Like the song says, “the good times are all gone, so I’m bound to moving on”, but at least we were able to capture some of those ephemeral moments on this humble album that rises above its initial concept, because of all that love you can hear on every track.

(I recommend you listen to these tracks with headphones.)