The idea for The Watters “Mellow EP” was born in the midst of 2020. There wasn’t a lot going on in the world and we found ourselves taking it pretty easy. We had fled to our home-town of Sedona, AZ in April of that year when things shut down. The beginnings of two songs came out of that trip that would become “Don’t Get Much Better” and “I Can Feel it.” The music and melodies for both songs came to me as we traveled home, but the lyrics wouldn’t come until a year or so later. We had moved to Texas seven years earlier and I knew I wanted to write about our new home state but the right words had not come to me yet. Frankly, I hadn’t marinated in the hill country vibes long enough yet to know exactly what to say about it. After a few weeks spending time with family in Arizona, we decided to head back to Texas.

As the summer of 2020 arrived, we were feeling a bit stir crazy not playing live music. A new music venue, The Far Out Lounge, had opened recently and it was walking distance from our house. They were looking to have Sunday Jazz Brunches on their outdoor stage. In July of 2020, no one was playing live music yet, but we decided we were ready to begin playing. The Far Out was a spacious, open environment where people could enjoy music outdoors, safely. More importantly, the people needed the music. WE needed the music. We aren’t a Jazz band per se, but we decided to do the Jazz brunch anyway. This decision would influence the sound of our upcoming EP. We continued our residency every Sunday for almost a year, playing with our favorite musicians in town, who under normal circumstances would have likely been touring with their normal bands. We got really tight with this group and felt a sense of gratefulness playing with them, despite the circumstances of the times.

In April of 2021, we received word of a songwriting contest to create a jingle for a local beer company. They asked for a song that encapsulated the Texas vibe. The melody I had written in Sedona the year before was perfect and the minute I saw the prompt, the lyrics spewed forth. Floating in a river, BBQing and drinking pilsner beer were just the right symbols to represent the laid-back spirit of living in Texas and the song wrote itself. We didn’t follow all the contest rules, so the song didn’t stand a chance of winning. However, we felt like we got a pretty good song out of it. We rushed into our friend JT Holt’s studio to cut the song and recorded three other songs we had written in the same time frame.

“I Can Feel it” was what became of the other song I had started in April of 2020. It had been finished during a subsequent trip to Sedona in 2021. It is an homage to our strange hometown, the coming of the Age of Aquarius (“I can feel it getting closer…”) and escaping reality. The disparity between the two trips was stark. During our time there in 2020, there wasn’t a soul in town and we had the place to ourselves. Our magical town was ours to enjoy and it reminded us of the days before tourism had taken over. Sedona became the place to be though in 2021, as people rushed there in droves to heal from the traumas of 2020 looking to try to find some sort of spirituality. These experiences inspired the tongue in cheek lyrics of the song, hinting that things rarely are quite as they seem.

“Mellow” is a jazzy song inspired by our Jazz brunches at Far Out Lounge during 2020 and the laid back vibes that came with the lack of anything going on at that time. I had written the melody in 2015, but never had a reason to actually finish the song, stashing it in the back of my notebook for what seemed like ages. It wasn’t until we booked the recording session that “Mellow” encapsulated the vibe of the EP we were going for, but also the year of 2020 in general.

“Life as a Dream” draws from the easy going and carefree vibes of the swingin’ 60’s from bands such as The Turtles and The Lovin’ Spoonful. We were lucky to have a sweet one year old baby boy to take care of when the world shut down in 2020, so despite all the chaos and uncertainty, we were able to keep our “head in the clouds” and find joy regardless.

We recorded these four songs in June of 2021 in the hill country outside of Austin. Clint Simmons on Drums, Trevor Nealon on Wurlitzer and Joe Beckham on Bass, joined Jenna and I at The Nest, a beautiful home studio owned by JT Holt. We tracked the five of us in one day. After rushing to get a version of “Don’t Get Much Better” finalized for the songwriting contest, we decided to put the project on hold. After all, we had just released our latest full- length album “Intuition” in January of 2021.

While it was hard for me not to finish the” Mellow EP” project, the spirit of the album was to take it “low and slow.” I could not betray that spirit. After all, that’s the way I prefer to cook. Why not apply the same technique to recording an album? The recently unearthed Beatles GET BACK documentary that had come out in 2021 provided further inspiration, to take more quality time and really get things dialed in right.

I decided to record and mix the rest of the album at our home studio in Austin. We recorded Sterling Steffen on tenor Sax and Wyatt Corder, our favorite horn section, that had been playing with us during our jazz brunch in the fall of 2021. I recorded vocals at the beginning of 2022 and mixed in July. It was mastered by our bassist, Joe Beckham. I hadn’t mixed one of Jenna and I’s projects since our final EP as The Oak Creek Band (before we changed our name) in 2015, but it felt like the right time to do a project “in house.”Overall, it was another fun record to make and we hope that you enjoy it and it helps you find some of the good memories of a period where, at the time, things seemed bleak.