The Story and Inspiration Behind the Album "Friends & Lovers, Sands & Shadows"

Themes

‘Friends & Lovers, Sands & Shadows’ is an album about relationships and solitude. It’s about sexual awakening and the fear of intimacy. It involves themes of shame, mourning, and loss but its most significant thread lies in its being told from the perspective of a lone island dweller. The stories from the record could be real memories or imagined fascinations but are most likely both on either side of a blurred line. 

To me, F&L continues to mean so much even after all these years because the process resulted in a journey that often felt like it was happening underneath and through me. It’s the most spiritual experience I’ve had. When I look back at the making of F&L I can acknowledge with certainty that its creation was both completely honest while also being propelled by a source outside of myself that I can only explain as feeling like a stream of consciousness or some spiritual transcendent encounter. But alas, I’ve now made myself sound like a pretentious prick. Look, it was a shit ton of fun to write and record. Although there are some things I’d go back and edit, I feel it stands as it is and represents a season of my life, warts and all, that I still periodically go back and relive. Not to mention, the tracks are now lost in the ether thanks to outdated software. 

Inspiration

Rufus Wainwright’s eclectic and instrument rich third album ‘Want’ had a heavy influence on the soundscapes of Friends & Lovers and with my newly acquired sequencing program, I was provided with a palette of endless possibilities. Another major inspiration for the album was Fiona Apple’s song “The First Taste”. It’s one of my favorite recorded songs and was a guiding post for what I wanted F&L to be.

A significant problem at the time with the recording of F&L was that I was an amateur recording artist tasking myself with engineering a project I wanted to sound like a garden of instruments. There’s a part of me that’s insecure about the result. Sometimes I ask myself if I’m just a phony who cheated his way through a so-called self made “record”. Maybe some listeners, ears attuned to professional recording techniques or not, cringe at what comes across as synthetic plastic programming. But ultimately, I have to remind myself that with all respect, I don’t give a shit. Part of the endeavor was to just create because I needed to and I’d be damned if what came out of the monitor wasn’t exactly what I wanted, all other outside preferences and opinions aside. I had only myself to trust. 

Methods

Friends and Lovers was recorded through a Digidesign MBOX 2 interface into an iMac. I used a Sterling Audio ST66 Tube mic to record acoustic guitar and vocals. Electric guitar (mostly a Fender Telecaster) was ran direct through the audio interface and mixed within a DAW. I used Pro Tools software for the live recording in conjunction with the sequencing program ‘Reason’. Anything on the record that is not vocals and guitar was created using Reason and sequenced with a midi controller. The record was mixed through a pair of M-Audio monitors. 

Art Work

I had some correspondence for a bit of time with a Turkish woman named Belkiz Kacar while I was writing Friends & Lovers. We’d met online and she shared some of her photos which I’ve since lost access to aside from the two I used as the covers for my two records and the others featured in a  picture slide video I made for my song ‘Horses’. (You can find it on Youtube at 'Horses by Dick Larson') Belkiz is the woman holding the camera featured on the cover of ‘Overripe Ruins’, a sort of Friends & Lovers EP extension. I particularly liked the vibrancy and lush quality of her sunflower photos and I thought it represented one of the aims I had for the record which was to involve a lot of variety, texture and color. I’ve since lost contact with Belkiz.