Watch the video for the first track to be taken from it ‘Three Hours Ahead Of Midnight’.
Canadian singer-songwriter Jerry Leger has announced the release of his new studio album ‘Donlands’ which lands on October 27th via Cowboy Junkies’ label Latent Recordings, and Leger has released the first single of it as a taster, ‘Three Hours Ahead Of Midnight’. Speaking about the track, Leger commented: “I hear it as a soulful song about maybe losing the battle but not losing the fight. I love the space in the recording, it keeps you close to its chest. The video was filmed at the Imperial Pub in Toronto, which has been there since the ’40s and is one of the few remaining pubs of its type in the big city. It has an incredible atmosphere and Mitch Fillion did a beautiful job making the video; he really captured the feeling of the song.”
On his new album, Leger has taken a different approach, teaming up with legendary Canadian producer/engineer Mark Howard (who has previously worked with Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Neil Young), whose trademark sound adds a new dimension to Leger’s approach. The album is named after the street in Toronto’s east end where it was recorded, in what once was the Donlands Theatre.
“Not a lot of people make records like Mark Howard anymore,” Leger says. “After I got to tell him how much Tom Waits’s ‘Real Gone’ meant to me, I fell right into the experience. Like all my albums, we recorded ‘Donlands’ mostly live in the studio with my band The Situation [Dan Mock, Kyle Sullivan, Alan Zemaitis] in a circle—no headphones, just listening and existing, breathing as a whole. To me, it’s a record that lives in its own world. Since I was a little kid, I’ve loved how recordings like The Flamingos’ ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ and ‘Pledging My Love’ by Johnny Ace sound so haunting. I knew Mark could get us that, with the right choice of material.”
Leger began by sending Howard 20 demos and was pleasantly surprised when they basically agreed on which 10 should comprise the record. From there, he describes the process as treating each song like a blank canvas, building up arrangements with the help of engineer Aaron Goldstein, who also added pedal steel and guitar to several tracks. But overall, Leger says it all came down to the atmosphere Howard created. He says the experience felt almost like creating a film noir soundtrack, with something unknown always lurking in the shadows.
You can pre-order ‘Donlands’ here.
