Kickstarter

---- UPDATE ----

A huge thank you to everyone who made this record possible by pledging, we are honored and encouraged by all of your support. If you haven't gotten a chance to pledge, the project will still be open until November 7th and now that the goal has been reached, we will receive the $5000 as well as anything pledged beyond it. We set our Kickstarter goal to pay for half of the record costs and are planning to cover the other half on our own, so if you are planning on buying a copy, pre-ordering it here still helps us out very much towards getting this thing pressed and printed. We appreciate all of the love, come see us on November 4th!

---- THANK YOU! ----

A year and a half ago, Kelly and I recruited Doug and Darla to help adapt and perform the songs from my last record, Dust Jacket. Within the first few rehearsals and shows, the four of us had become close friends and the music had grown more interesting and beautiful with each contributing their unique voice and talents. Although we were playing under the name "Joel P West," we quickly started functioning as a group and have been busy all year writing songs for a full-length record. These are songs that we've written together and will be recorded exactly as we play them live, so we're going to release the album as "The Tree Ring." Go to our videos page to see us play one of the songs in a dog park and one of the songs on a stage.

Later this week, we will be packing our things up to a small cabin in Idyllwild, where we will spend eight days recording all of the sounds for the album with the talented Chris Hobson. The project is going to be mixed by one of our favorite engineers, Birgir Jon Birgirson (Biggi), who runs the Sundlaugin Studio where much of Iceland's independent music is made, and a longtime legend of mine T.W. Walsh will do the final mastering. These fantastic engineers were all our first pick because their approach and style are aligned with ours, so we're really excited to entrust these songs to their hands. They have given us very reasonable rates for their craft and now we're looking to gather funds.

There's no way around the costs required to make a quality recording, but we want to be transparent about the process since we can't give the record away like we did with the Dust Jacket Project. We're covering what we can up front, but we need to gather an additional $5000 to finish the project. We are using Kickstarter because we want to see if we can make the record release a little more communal by reversing the traditional process of investing money, creating a product, and then selling the product to recover costs.

It's essentially a pre-sale and if you pledge $10 or more, you'll be reserving a copy of the record that will be sent to you early, and you'll be playing a vital role in getting the project finished. There are a number of options in the right hand tab along with some goodies to say thank you for contributing. We're going to leave this opportunity open until early November, when we come back to San Diego to play all of the new songs live. You can visit The Tree Ring Blog or our Facebook page throughout the fall for updates on recording.

Kickstarter works on an all-or-nothing basis so if a total of at least $5000 is pledged before November 7th, all cards will be charged, we will receive the funding, and everyone who has pitched in will be mailed their goods early in the new year. Shipping is included with your pledge.

Thank you for supporting our music. If you haven't already, enjoy a free download of Dreams Where I Am Sleeping (the song from our dog park video).

Lastly, a huge thanks to our friends who made the above video:
Images + Edit : Brandon Tauszik
Images + Producing : Kenny Laubbacher