Released October 24 2019

Background

Carnival Life is the semi-collaborative project involving Scott Arnold and myself, Taylor Batory. The reason I say it’s semi-collaborative is because Scott came to me initially as a client wanting to record his songs, but as the project went on, he deemed me a member of his band called Carnival Life. I liked the way we worked together on this material, so I’m more than happy to be the other 50% of the band.

Technically, I’ve known Scott for many years, as he was a longtime guitar teacher at Southern Thumb Music in Richmond, MI. Southern Thumb is where I got my start as a guitar player when I was 13 or so. I didn’t take lessons from Scott, but I saw him in the store every time I was there. Eventually, Southern Thumb unfortunately closed and all the students and many of the teachers migrated to another nearby, locally run store called KO Music Studio in Ray Twp, MI. I, myself, got hired as a teacher at KO for a period of time, so Scott and I would see each other more often and sometimes talk guitar and music every so often in between lessons. Scott soon discovered that I was running a studio and attempting to start a home studio business, and he was excited at the prospect of recording some of his songs and had the idea to try to record an album with me. Turns out he lived right down the road from me too, so thus began what became Carnival Life.

Beyond this origin story, there isn’t much documentation about how any of this album was made and produced. All of the material on this album was written by Scott, but the wild thing, to me anyways, is that none of it is written down in any medium. Scott just remembered how all the songs went and would play them for me whenever we got together. And here’s where the “semi-collaborative” part comes in. Some of the songs he brought in were like small slices and needed some direction and development. I ended up helping with arranging and also came up with some ideas and lyrics that ended up making it to the album, and Scott was happy with a fair amount of the ideas I brought forward. Scott relied on me to handle the production of the album as well, and it was fun to have another person in the studio to bounce ideas off of when arranging and recording. I also performed all the drums on this album and recorded them in my home studio, and I’m happy with how they came out, considering it was one of the few albums where I actually performed and recorded the drums myself.

Carnival Life has been taking their sweet time completing album #2. We released this first album in October 2019, which is right before the pandemic hit. We had begun working on more songs shortly after the album dropped, but then the pandemic made it so we couldn’t get together in person, and Scott is an entirely analog sort of person, so online collaboration wasn’t going to happen. Then amidst the pandemic, I moved to Ontario, Canada, so getting together with Scott became less frequent. I’ve been involved in so many other projects since starting work on Carnival Life’s second album, as well, so the album has kind of been on the back burner for awhile. Scott’s told me numerous times though that he doesn’t mind the way we work, because he likes how stress-free all of it is, and frankly, I kind of enjoy that aspect of it as well. It’s a pretty low pressure band to be in, and I’m fine with that. That being said, at the time of writing this, I can confidently say that album #2 is basically done, and we just need some extra time to finalize a few things before releasing it into the wild. Expect some news on the album’s release in the near future.