Night Music by Rebekah Pulley

THE REASON
I recorded Night Music myself at home between May 2020 - March 2021. It started out as a small project to keep me occupied for a few weeks during the covid quarantine but after a few months it grew into my sole sense of normality and purpose. Its completion brought me a bittersweet sense of finality. “Now what am I going to do?” I asked myself. Creating Night Music was a very personal voyage for me and I found it rather difficult to step off the ship. You may see this as me being overly dramatic about the making of eight songs but those songs were my entire world for the same amount of time it takes to gestate a child in the womb and as it turns out, I love all of my children as deeply as anyone can love. So this is sort of my love child to you.

THE PROCESS
Night Music is a wonderfully apt title since I am a bit of a night owl and spent many of my late night quarantine hours in the studio banging on my old Baldwin upright piano. Speaking of which, this was only supposed to be a piano and vocal recording. But I finished that rather quickly and found myself with more time on my hands than I knew what to do with so I added some simple organ parts. Finished. Still quarantine. So I threw in some electric guitar … and then strings … and then horns … and then accordion … and then bass guitar. Still quarantine. So I went back and started tweaking, refining, and building on the parts I had already recorded and in some instances, rerecording parts. Hell, I learned to play instruments, like the lap steel guitar, just so I could add them to songs. For the vocal I decided to use only my scratch takes (the original guide track) because I wanted the rawness and mistakes to remain in place. All my vocals were recorded on an old Shure SM57 microphone. It was hand held which made it noisy and you can hear the airy ‘pfft’ sounds but I felt that that gave the vocals a more endearing quality. Actually all the instruments, except for the upright piano, were recorded with the same SM57 mic (I really got into SM57s for a minute). I had to stop myself from the escalating madness of adding more instrumental layers when March 2021 rolled around. It was time to start editing the tracks which is like putting a puzzle together. Thankfully, I really enjoy puzzles.


THE END
I intended on mixing and mastering the record myself because I started it and by god I'd see the damn thing through to the end. I realized pretty quickly that I was too personally invested in each and every track to have the type of perspective needed to make a good final mix. That's when I called up Steve Connelly at Zen Recording Studio and asked if I could book some time with him to utilize his masterful mixing skills and astute ears. I'm so glad I did that, really glad. There were some ups and downs with that. Again, it was very difficult to leave my babies in the care of another for the first time. But as it always happens with Steve Connelly he knew exactly how to handle a bunch of ‘unruly kids’. So this is it, the end product of my hyper-focused solitude with all of its imperfections and oddities. I hope you will find some enjoyment somewhere in my Night Music.

Rebekah Pulley is a St. Pete, FL based songwriter and performer whose sultry, seasoned voice has been described as jaw dropping with a tendency to break your heart and shake your soul. Her music has wryly evolved, tapping roots-rock, blues, old-school country & western, jazz, and even gospel earning her 7 'Best Of The Bay’ awards from Tampa Bay’s own Creative Loafing.

rebekahpulley.com