The Making of Blame It on Midnight
I spent most of 2025 working on the Evidence albums — a project that was primarily production, mixing, and mastering. By the time the new year came around, I was itching to actually play and sing again. I wanted to find out where I was with that.
Like I’ve done before, I started by looking for a cover song. I recorded the first notes for “Please Be With Me” on January 19, 2026 — Scott Boyer’s quiet, searching ballad felt like the right place to start. One song led to another, and before long I knew I was making a covers album. Two and a half months later, Blame It on Midnight was done, and released on April 24th - my mom’s birthday.
What I discovered early on was that I was way out of shape. I hadn’t been playing or singing much, and it showed. I had to grow my nails back, rebuild my callouses, and get my guitars sorted out. Neither of my two favorites — the 1964 Gibson Melody Maker or the 1988 Fender Strat Plus — were in working order. The Melody Maker has never been to a guitar tech in its life. Every modification and setup it’s ever had has been done by me, or when I was younger, by my Dad — including the day we pulled the original Gibson PU380 single-coil and dropped in a humbucker together. That’s a small source of pride for me. I also played my Taylor 510-CE, which you can see on the album cover, on most of the songs. And I used an IYV Les Paul Jr clone that I’ve grown fond of — inexpensive, stays in tune, and has a P90 pickup that sounds particularly good through the Neural DSP plugins I’ve been using lately.
The studio side of things I’ve always enjoyed. In recent years I’ve been pushing myself to use the tools I have more intentionally — plugins that would have been expensive outboard hardware in another era. On this album I ran all the vocals and most of the guitars through the Lindell 69 channel strip, which emulates the Helios Type 69 consoles from the 1960s and 70s. It has a character I keep coming back to.
Now that it’s finished, I find myself in unfamiliar territory: I’m not sure how I feel about it. I know I wanted to play and sing, and once I got started I gave it everything I had. I know I like the way it sounds. Whether it’s good or bad in some larger sense — I honestly can’t say. There’s no particular reason this album needed to exist, and that makes it hard to evaluate. But I wanted to make it, I made it, and I’m proud of how it came out. At this point in my life, that has to be enough.