Broken Open

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		If You Will Walk With Me	4:35	Play
2		Bold Troubadour	4:23	Play
3		Letter to Ramone	3:56	Play
4		Hymn	4:43	Play
5		In The Kingdom	3:14	Play
6		Down in the Bunker	2:36	Play
7		Poodles From Hell	3:44	Play
8		Moving Train	3:23	Play
9		's Folk to Me	3:40	Play
10		If Pigs	3:17	Play
11		My Old Home Town	6:33	Play
12		Goodnight Baby	4:09	Play

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Description

In December 1998 Singer/Songwriter JP Jones was looking for a new musical project. Independent recording label VISION COMPANY RECORDS had just released his critically acclaimed Angels on the Road CD (a 25-year retrospective of previously unrecorded songs) in November and work on a disc of new material was still several months away.The opportunity he was looking for presented itself in the form of newly purchased PARIS DAW (Digital Audio Workstation).

Jones had hit upon the idea of reworking his five-year-old Broken Open tracks. "The original idea was to learn the machine," says Jones. "Broken Open had been recorded five years earlier and technology had changed. I wanted to take the original 8-track analog recordings and make them hotter and cleaner. Everything had been done on such a limited budget the first time. As I got into the project I started to get real excited by it, because what I was producing seemed to be so competitive sonically--I mean just from a technical standpoint. In the end it made sense for practical reasons. Broken Open had been released five years earlier and we were out of inventory. It felt good knowing that the work I was doing would serve the two-fold purpose of a reissue and a new release all at once."

While technology may change, what's essential about Broken Open remains constant. First and foremost it's a songwriter's record. From the opening If You Will Walk With Me invitation through the album's warm and celebratory Good Night Baby conclusion, what comes across here is a master communicator with something to say. From the quiet and prayer-like, solo piece Hymn to the riotous, tongue-in-check Poodles From Hell the listener will be treated to many memorable tracks that will resonate long after the disc has stopped spinning. Moving Train (the closest thing on the album to a title cut) was covered by Maria Sangiolo on her 1996 Follow Your Own Road CD, and while most of the disc can best be described as the work of a modern day singer/songwriter, at least one cut, My Old Hometown, was adapted from a traditional melody. With the exception of Kurt Meyer's fretless electric bass, featured prominently on eleven of the twelve tracks, all Broken Open instrumentation is acoustic.

Still, the album features dense, instrument-rich performances with seemingly equal folk and rock influences. Jones also borrows from his classical training in composition and his performances are featured throughout on vocals, steel string guitars, rack harp and piano. Other musicians include Dave Lang, AJ Vallee, Paul Hubert and Rob Rudin on drums and percussion, Rick McKinney on fiddle and mandolin, Lloyd Salisbury on trumpet and nylon string guitar and Adele Tarkowski and Dale Hopper on backing vocals. As with the recordings, cover art and graphic design have been updated based on the original 1994 materials. Kerstin Zettmar did the cover tapestry. Original photographs by Lynn Tyler date back to the same 1993 sessions that produced the original cover pictures.

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"Calls to mind a Nashville Skyline era Dylan, Unplugged Clapton and Springsteen at his best." - Ken Stroebel, Norwich Bulletin