My old band, The Reign, is on the cusp of releasing our second album. It only took 35 years.

Note: Some links in this post lead to products in our band’s online store, The Reign Store. Proceeds support the band, which I’m a part of.

Better Late than Neverland is the first of two albums that we plan to release into the world, hopefully this year. For the second of those, we have a lot of recording left to do, but for this first one, we had a head start: we’d already recorded nine songs, so it was mostly a matter of getting them mixed and mastered.

I say “mostly” because we ran into a major challenge early on. We’d recorded the songs at a real studio (Neverland) onto 24-track, 2-inch tape. Unfortunately, when the tape was digitized (whenever that was, and by whomever), it was transferred at the wrong speed, making all the tracks slower and lower in pitch than they should have been.

Oh, and they somehow managed to lose three of the tracks for each song, as well. That wasn’t a huge deal, in most cases, as those tracks usually held just a click track and some scratch vocals. But we did lose important parts of a few of the songs.

Fortunately, we were able to hire the extraordinary engineer and producer Marc DeSisto to mix the album. (Check out his credits: he’s worked with Melissa Etheridge, which earned him a Grammy nomination, as well as U2, Pink Floyd, Warren Zevon, and so many more.) Marc worked some Pro Tools sorcery to get the source material pretty close to the original speed and pitch. And, thanks to modern recording technology, we were able to replace most of the lost parts.

He then took that chaos and made it, as he likes to say, “sound like a record.”

I am happy to report that it really does!

When I jumped aboard the project, a bit over a year ago, I thought we were just memorializing the songs, but it’s spiraled into an actual release, complete with various media (vinyl, CD, digital), a single (“Wall St. Wisdom” and, I’m sure, more on the way), and a video (“Sad Hearts”). T-shirts, too!

If you’re interested, The Reign Store has everything available for (as I write this) pre-order (the release date is July 22). I’m sure the band members who threw their money into the pit would appreciate earning some of that back. (I didn’t spend any cash, unless time really is money — in which case, I spent a lot!)

As I mentioned, there’s another album in the pipeline. It will include other songs the band was working on when we broke up, as well as a couple newer ones — most importantly, a brand new one (so brand new that it’s still being written!) to celebrate the birth of Doug the drummer’s grandchild, baby Reign.

Stay tuned!

Better Late than Neverland is available on vinyl, CD, and digital download through The Reign Store. It’s also available for purchase digitally through Amazon and iTunes (through Apple Music).

The album and individual songs are available to stream on YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and other streaming services. (You can find them on YouTube, too, but if you’re not a Premium subscriber, it will serve you ads….)

lyrics and Liner Notes

(I’ll update this list as I complete blog posts…)