Paducah-based musician Chris Black has had a prolific career both as a solo artist and in local bands like Oh Yeah Dakota! His latest release is a three-track EP distilled into a single cut, titled Carl Winslow Sessions. Black speaks to Tracy Ross ahead of his EP release.
Black explains that mixing down all three tracks into a single cut was part experiment, part necessity. "A, I'm kind of poor," Black begins. "I was supposed to do an album with my cousin playing drums. He played drums on the first song. So, that's what got the Carl Winslow thing going because of Family Matters."
When Black's cousin needed to focus on his own out-of-town band, Black decided to continue making the EP solo. "The second song was me by myself in my studio. The third one I just put together and was sitting there thinking about it and said, what if I just released all three of these as one song?"
"A, when I pay to get it distributed, I'll only have to pay for a single and not a full album. I thought it would be cool to do because if somebody liked the third song, it's like a digital record in a way. You can't get away from it, you know what I mean? You have to listen to it all, or you'll have to scroll through one of them."
"In this day and age, it's so easy to record something, get a hold of a distribution company, and put it on Spotify. The guy that masters my stuff was talking to me via email last summer, and I think I put out a couple of singles in a row. And he was like, well, it's a singles world now. It was just something kind of different."
Black attributes his extensive original catalogue to songwriting being his "favorite thing to do. I get to the point where if I haven't written a song in like a month, I'll start to feel useless. I just have to try to come up with something. I feel really unproductive if I'm not writing, so I guess that's it."
Chris Black's Carl Winslow Sessions is available now on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon.
Hear the full interview here:
