Swirling organs, analog circuitry, omnivorous world influences, digital manipulation and an all-American high lonesome sound come together in Estate Sale’s new album, combining emotional and plaintive song-writing and singing, offbeat instrumentation, retro sensibility, and modern production.
In an effort to stay sane during quarantine, Joey Colando (Meekos & Me, Kidd Bayou) and David Wechsler (Piñataland, Tyranny of Dave) teamed up to craft an album detailing the vagaries of modern American life. Colando would write songs and record them into his phone and Wechsler would try hard to keep up with arrangement ideas on his computer. On one collaborative song, No Road, both of them stumped for lyrics for the end section, they asked songwriter Anna Soltys (Anna Soltys & The Familiar, Syzygal) to help finish the lyrics, which started a collaboration that led to her singing on 6 of the album’s tracks, including duets with Colando on both No Road and the epic finale Curtain Call, a song detailing the fraught relationship between Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Mayo Methot.
Breaking quarantine to record final parts (and re-record phone recordings), they set up an impromptu recording studio in an empty Chicago theater closed by the pandemic. The 10 songs span the gamut, from obviously inspired by current events to a meditative road movie without a destination, the indifferent hand of fate, and, of course, the inescapable bête noire of songwriting, relationships.
