There is a special reason why recording artists refer to a newly promoted work as a release. It is common for audiences to think, Great, here is a new song that [insert Favorite Artist name] has released to me. That much is good and true. But for the artist it also references the feeling that they have released themselves from the burden of continuing to work on this piece of music, work that may have taken a few days or several years. Although a single song generally develops into a release over the course of days or weeks, not years, my song, Just Another Lonely Girl is not only one which tells a little story, its creation has a convoluted story of its own.

In 1990, after my maternal grandfather passed away, I felt like I needed to spend some time away from my hometown of Memphis for a while. So I accepted an assignment as a staff musician aboard the MS Fantasy, which was the flagship for Carnival Cruise Lines in the Caribbean at the time. I stayed on for several weeks. It was a fun job with great musicians from whom I learned much, and the revenue helped me continue paying down my student loans. After the cruise stint was done, I returned home and reconnected with musicians who I had performed with in the Mid-South area for many years. I talked to my friend, Alan Hayes about assisting him with the development of his recording studio. I had continued to compose new music even while I was away on the Caribbean gig, but there was not a recording facility on the ship, and I didn't have recording gear. With new resources in Memphis, I wanted to work again in my community on bigger projects. The build on Alan's home studio went well, and he dubbed the studio: Al's Harmonic Salon. Once up and running, we developed quite a roster of talented bands and writers in Memphis, including gospel artist Andrew Jackson, rapper Al Capone, jazz-funk band Straight Up Buzz and alt-rockers Mash-o-Matic.
One late night in 1990 while watching a talk show, I saw a lady musician, and I didn't know who it was at first. While listening to the interview, an idea for a story sparked in my imagination about a guy who meets a young lady to whom he is attracted, loses contact with her, and then years later sees her on a TV show, giving him an opportunity to try and find her again. During the week that followed, I worked out a complete lyric for my original title, which was Just Another Little Girl. Subsequently I put the title and lyrics through some changes and arrived at the lyrics you hear in my new song release.

The actual record production of the song is the weird part of this saga, because I have never taken a music arrangement through so many different recording formats! In 1991 my friend, bassist and singer Rob Caudill was letting me borrow a Tascam model 144, a 4-track cassette system, in return for repair work I was performing on his Ampeg SVT bass amp. I made time to get a quick sketch of my new song idea recorded on that 4-track, arranging and recording an electric bass accompaniment to my melody, then recording a drum track, then working out the piano arrangement, and finally over-dubbing percussion and vocal tracks by mixing the first three tracks down to an Akai open-reel recorder of my own and folding that back onto the Tascam 144. I tranferred the multi-tracks I had from the 144 to the professional recording system that Alan and I were using at the time, which was the Tascam DA-88 system. I wrote a 3-saxophone ensemble arrangement and hired Kirk Smothers to perform that. I also had him play a 16-measure solo in the middle of the song, which he killed! My friend, Shawn Lane and I had been working together on record projects during this period. He was also using a Tascam DA-88 as part of his home studio, so I took one of my tapes to his place and hired him to play an electric guitar solo on the song. I was happy with the initial arrangement, but I got busy with lots of engineering for other writers and producers, on-location recordings, and playing gigs in the Memphis area.
In 1995 I produced Musically Yours, the only album of spirituals and show tunes by popular bass-baritone singer, James A. Hyter. In November of that year, I took my mixes for the project to Manhattan and hired the brilliant record engineer, Bob Katz to take care of the mastering. After the mastering session, Bob and his wife, Mary Kent took me to club SOB's to hear Tito Puente orchestra. Mary had been working on her book, Salsa Talks! She introduced me to Señor Puente! Cool. The Musically Yours production happened during the final days of brick-and-mortar record stores in the Mid-South, so I ended up learning the record industry from the viewpoint of a producer and door-to-door record promoter. Events during the following years also inspired new songs, and my dad suggested an idea for a song called, Ship I Never Sailed On. I worked up new demos, wrote music which was used by editor and composer, Tony DiMito in syndicated TV shows and also had some of my music placed in independent feature films. I worked as an actor in Memphis area theaters during this time. I collaborated and performed with Ellen Ruby-Markie and Chad Marsh in a band we had called Ruby's Cube. In 1999 I joined the chorus of Opera Memphis and worked with them on at least one major show per season for the next eight years. I started studying with one of the best vocal coaches in the USA, Thomas Machen. In 2001, I met Amy Van Doren while acting in and scoring music for a staging of Shakespeare's Cymbeline. She and I married in 2010 with a fun wed-cation in Key West, Florida.

When I finally revisited JALG, the theme of it had new meaning for me personally. Whereas it was just an imaginative story originally, it now felt more at heart. I decided to re-record the vocal tracks. By this time I had been working in the domain of Digital Audio Workstations for over fourteen years, because Alan and I had converted his studio to DAW production, using the earliest offerings of Emagic Logic, as soon as computers were powerful enough to do respectful audio work. I had acquired my own DAW system with Logic and the fastest edition of Apple's Macintosh G4 in 1999, populating that system with most of my work to date while also recording, editing and mixing for other Memphis artists. So my little romantic song had now gone from a sketch on a Tascam 144 to an Akai open-reel stereo machine, back to the Tascam 144, then to the Tascam DA-88 machines and forward into Emagic Logic on a Mac at my own studio. In 2009 I also acquired a MacBook Pro, and some of the new overdubs were done on that system. Emagic Logic had been acquired by the Apple Computer Company and was now simply called, Logic Pro. I booked the recital hall at Amro Music store for June 5, 2014, solely for the purpose of recording their wonderful Steinway B played by friend, Ben Flint performing my piano arrangement. His skills as a keyboardist and reader (as well as composer) are immense. And he also improvised some terrific, gospel infused comping during the sax solo. I made a temp mix of the song and set that track up in my studio G4. I was very pleased with the way the production had developed, but the arrangement had no rhythm guitar. I had been working with Tommy Burroughs during this time, because guitarist and composer Steve Harris hired Tommy to perform violin on his album, Somewhere Between. At the end of one session, Tommy was having fun playing an amazing array of jazz chord voicings on mandolin. The next day I realized, Yeah! JALG should use mandolin. That will be fun and different. So I hired Tommy to do a session on April 15 of 2015 just improvising over the chord changes. He had fun and said, Well, let me know if you come up with anything useful. Such was his modesty; he was a virtuoso on mandolin and fiddle! I was able to pastiche together a very flowing mandolin track from his improv's. Then my fantastic electric bass playing friend, Barry Campbell and I tracked fresh bass and drums together on the afternoon of May 13, 2015 using Logic Pro 6. I transferred the multi-track stems back to my MacBook and continued to work in Logic Pro 10.

This production stayed cool on a back burner for a couple of years. But then in early 2018, when Kallen Esperian contacted me with a need for record and video production of a session she was performing with Gary Beard, some new ideas started hatching. For one, I was very interested in having a soprano sing on another song I had in development, Ship I Never Sailed. This was the song idea my father had suggested a few years before, and I was working up an arrangement and production of it, partly due to having a new Fender Stratocaster that was given to me by record producer, Eddie Kramer. (That's a whole other story!) Kallen listened to what I had recorded so far on my Ship song and liked it, so she agreed to sing a track. Her contribution was beautiful, needless to say! One fine day not long after, I was sort of hit with a lightning bolt. An entire story for an opera crystalized in my mind in what seemed like just a matter of minutes. It was weird and kind of scary, because I knew it was going to be a long haul to ferret out all these ideas. So I decided to take a look at my catalog of songs going all the way back to the mid 1980's and figure out how much of that material may suit the libretti for the show I had in mind. JALG was definitely a go on this idea, so I committed to recording better vocal tracks and getting a better mix. My son, Colin was four and a half years old at the time. I remember a fun moment on a day that I finished recording a new lead vocal. Working in my home studio, I felt that I had just sung an acceptable take. When I finished the last verse and the final chord of the song played, I heard Colin say, I like this, daddy. I like! Apparently he had been standing behind me for several minutes just looking at me and listening. That was all the approval I needed.
The work of Memphis producer and master engineer, Kerry Kernan came to my attention. I took the project to him, hoping he may have time to help me with the final mix. He did, and it turned out that he and I had a lot of mutual friends. He suggested the magic guitarist, Steve Bethany. Kerry had been working with Steve at Mississippi Boulevard Church, which has an outrageously talented group of musicians in their services. Steve listened and digged the song. He performed and recorded a terrific acoustic rhythm guitar part in his own home studio in September of 2022. Now there was another track on the song from another recording system, even. Kerry already had all of the other tracks for JALG in his ProTools system, since I had sent them to him for mixing. At this point, I performed editing and mixing to get good balances between the mandolin and acoustic guitar parts, together with a few cool riffs that my friend, Hal McCormack had performed on a dulcimer type of instrument. I forwarded that stem of strings to Kerry. He put his musical touch on the mix and created two pre-master stems, one for all the instrumental tracks and one for the lead and background vocals. I took those two stems and did the final balancing and mastering on my newer Macintosh, an M1 running Logic Pro 10.7.2. Voila! The production is what you hear now on iTunes, Spotify or whatever your favored channel may be.

Whew! To quote the Grateful Dead, What a long strange trip it's been. It feels good to finally be able to share this one with you. But I still have plenty to do. At the time of this extended message, I have composed three acts for the opera. But I need to finish writing the fourth act to complete the shooting script. Just Another Lonely Girl will be there, but actually in a different guise, because I have created a duet arrangement of the song for the show. By the way, Jasir was a moniker given to me by a friend from East Africa during my time as an undergrad in Boston. I later adopted it as a name for my publishing. I don't think of it so much as a product name, but more as a community spirit, a life force that inspires and guides the creation of new music with the help of good friends. The Jasir studio band for this new release was:
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Kirk Smothers - tenor saxophone solo & saxophone ensemble tracks
Shawn Lane - electric guitar solo
Benjamin Flint - piano
Barry Campbell - electric bass
Tommy Burroughs - mandolin
Hal McCormack - dulcimer
Steve Bethany - acoustic rhythm guitar
Jeff Scott Rust - drum set, percussion, lead and background vocals

Words and music composed and arranged by Jeff Scott Rust
Label: Jasir Productions
Copyright: 2023 Jeff Scott Rust d/b/a Jasir Songs (BMI)
Tracking engineers: Jeff Scott Rust & Steve Bethany
Mix engineer: Kerry Kernan
ISRC: USCPX2300005
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Happy 2024 to you and yours, and keep in touch.

jeff@jasirsongs.com
January 18, 2024