Elizabeth Crew & Mark Scudder: Tradition

Play This Album

One of the people keeping me sane during my last few months in Binghamton, NY was an old friend named Liz Crew. Liz and I worked together at WHRW and we were both affected by some of the goings-on there that could have been handled better. Like a good friend should, she was always there, in the background, even when we grew apart or our lives took us in drastically different directions. And when it came time to be close again, she was there. It's one of those things that I'll always appreciate.

While I was getting my head straight for the next chapter, we used to go to dinner with her boyfriend Leigh and we'd talk for hours. At one point she mentioned that she would be playing a few nights of traditional Christmas music at a local - well, it's a hippy shop. Long flowery dresses, incense, stones, that sort of thing. How this happened, my sociopolitically-warped mind said to me, is a mystery to me. "This is just a thought," I said to her, "but would you mind if I came down for that and just noodled over your playing on guitar?" "Sure!" she said. "That might be really cool."

Well, there was no expectation that it would be anything. To make things more interesting, her schedule and mine were so jammed up in different places that we didn't even have the chance to practice! But the gig rolled around (just a few days after I'd make the decision to move, incidentally), and we met up that night. I had my now-standard load-out of electric guitar, firewire audio interface, and MacBook Pro, and I had just started playing with a new, unique reverb plug-in that was dying to be used on some leads. I dialed in a respectable sound, and from the first notes Liz played, it was pure magic (magjick?). It was just right. People loved it. With big dumb smiles we played for hours, and came back for the next day's gig and did it again.

At a slow point in the second gig, I said to her, "You know, we could record an album of this stuff, really quickly." And since I had the essential parts of my "studio" with me, within minutes we were scrounging behind the front counter for a USB cable to connect her keyboard to my computer. Unfortuantely, she'd never used the USB jack on her keyboard and neither one of us could get it to work. We got together at her house a few days later and laid down the entire album in an afternoon, both of us playing together. I did a few extra takes at home a few days later, but we essentially recorded the entire album in that one afternoon.

My end of things was primarily inspired by the occasional performances of Dream Theater's Jordan Rudess and John Petrucci as a duet (State of Grace in particular). In order to disarm any potential licensing issues, we released Tradition for free for the Christmas season, and then took it down. We may offer it in Christmases to come as well.

Tradition was very well received in the short time it was available.