Paul Barrere & Roger Cole ‘Riding The Nova Train’ – Today’s Cool Album of the Day’

Posted 13 Feb 2013 in Albums of 2013, Albums of the 10s, Blues-Rock

Today’s Cool Album of the Day (#836 in the Series) is Paul Barrere & Roger Cole, Riding the Nova Train

Paul Barrere’s latest project is finally available; a collection of eclectic tunes reminiscent of the early days of Little Feat, recorded with old friend Roger Cole, Riding The Nova Train has a sample of influences through Paul’s long career. After the band plays at Feat Fan XI in Jamaica in March, Paul will be taking a year off to deal with treatment for Hep C. Below are some notes from Paul about the project and a link to hear a sample and order the CD….here’s a bit of the history of the album.

An album, by definition a printed book containing an anthology of writings, reproductions of photographs or artwork, musical compositions, etc. … Riding on the Nova Train is just that, 10 works of musical art, created over a period of time, all reflective of life experiences, some very personal that I must say thanks to Roger Cole, my friend and co-producer, writer and player on this project, and even at times my high school counselor ….

We started this album back when we were setting up the studio at Roger’s for the Coco Montoya recording we produced, starting each song as if it were a blank canvas to work on …. we would take some time and lay down some grooves, later to be edited into a song framework. That was seven years ago – we would ask some drummers to come by and jam, the first one was Tommy Hardisty, an old friend of Rogers from back east, and we hit it off pretty well, we recorded “Right Out of Wrong” together one afternoon, that was one of the few songs that was recorded that way. I had this progression running around in my mind for a couple of years, loosely based on Ray Charles “Drowning in My Own Tears,” and Tommy Nailed it with me, but really most of the songs came from me playing along with a click track and a basic beat, or we would take a groove that was laid down by one of the drummers and build the track that way.

One of the most challenging songs was mastered by Kenny Pierce, the title track – “Riding on the Nova Train” – this song was really fun to put together, I was afforded the opportunity to really jam some wild tracks that we, or should I say roger edited together and made up a track that had some different time and space feels, but the challenge was to have Kenny fit the drums to these odd measures, and he performed so well – the lyric was a kind of look back at my own history and throw in some answers that were provided by my father when I was a screw-up, he was quite a man, and then Roger, who pushed me in that direction had the great idea to deliver the vocal in a lower register, almost as if my father was talking to me back in my teenage wasteland ….

“One Eyed Jack” was completely edited together, not so much the guitar but the drums, and Roger really made the groove come alive, the original drum track was Ed Kernen, but by the time roger was finished with it we had to rename the drummer Ed I Ted because it was pieced together with precision by Roger, and I thought up the name Ed I Ted since Ed was the one hitting the drums …. It came out really funky and probably most resembles what I’ve done in the past with Little feat, but it swings hard my friends – on all three of these songs I was lucky to call in a favor from Pete Griffin and have him play some bass parts, I worked on his recording gryphon labs “modern mythology” that Roger also produced, one of the real reasons I wanted to work with roger was how incredible he is at creating in mixes and editing some unreal sounds, or as we call it – makin’ noise – anyhow Pete played with Dwezil Zappa in Zappa Plays Zappa, and he is a master on the base, so I was really happy to have him play on this recording as well, especially his upright bass parts that I will get into in my next news and notes segment –

ya all keep smiling out there!!!!

–Paul Barrere