Recent music #5

This month…

I am once again digging into the archives. The spring proved to be a light time for gigs so I didn’t have a lot of new stuff to share with you all. Hopefully, after lots of playing this summer, I’ll bring you some new music.

As always, thanks for listening.

Thanks, Mike

From 2018 to 2022, I had a little band called the Witherbees. Started with one of my former students jacqui armbruster, the band was a chance for me to explore a lot of different sounds I was interested in and to try some things I’d never been able to do in a band before. I always described our sound as “folk jazz,” inspired heavily by Bill Frisell and Sam Amidon. It was also a chance for me to live out a little bit of my love for Wilco and artsy bands of that ilk. I learned so much playing behind a singer and grew a lot as a musician through the time the band was a thing.

The band had some personnel changes throughout its brief history but at the core was the musical connection between myself and jacqui. We wrote some songs together, I learned their songs, and we made a few records. The first record even got some decent press! The pandemic really put a halt on things and we had trouble finding our footing after things started to open back up. You can hear our two records Mike Lorenz & the Witherbees and Love Letter on all the streaming platforms.

In 2022, we actually recorded a whole set of music that has never (and likely will never) see a proper release. I’ve included a few cuts here including a song jacqui and I co-wrote called “I’m Sorry That I Love You,” a song of mine vaguely reminiscent of Bela Fleck & the Flecktones with the working title of “Strummies,” and a goofy piece I wrote called “Bark Woof,” inspired by two emphatic and energetic little kids at a gig we played. What you have here are rough mixes (except for ISTILY, which has some mixing work) from a recording session we did in August of 2022. These recordings are essentially the last time we all played music together. Hope you enjoy it.