An oft-repeated adage in the music industry is that you have your whole life to make your first album and a year to make your second. For me, the front half was true enough. As one of three songwriters in the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love (TOBASOL), I had already signed with a label in New York and released two independent albums. I'd been gigging since I was 15, been out on tour, and had some studio experience. I wasn't a complete novice, though in hindsight, it's easy to see how little I really knew. What I did know was that my first solo album was going to be a grand, sweeping gesture, sourced from a well of self-mythology and wanderlust, built on the shoulders of my most important influences. Summer Cherry Ghosts wasn't my first release, but it was my first solo album, the one I'd been building toward my whole life. 

In those verdant, dreaming days, the sky was the limit. I had passion, drive, and enough naivete to act on my biggest ideas. There was little in my life that didn't get romanticized or reframed with the barely-earned sense of nostalgia I'd been fostering since I first started writing songs. My heroes were intelligent pop maximalists: Brian Wilson, Jeff Lynne, the Zombies, Jellyfish, XTC. The zeitgeist, especially in Detroit, favored lean, dirty garage rock, but I was concerned with the old fashioned craft of "album-making."

Created parallel to what was later released as the first Great Lakes Myth Society album, Summer Cherry Ghosts was just as ambitious. I was in my mid-20s, acting out a lifetime of producer fantasies, and digging myself into a pit of debt it would take years to climb out of. Initial sessions began in Hammondsport, New York with Benjamin Ridley Jr., engineer of TOBASOL's first album. After Ben packed up his Detroit studio and moved back home to the Finger Lakes, he built Windfall Recording up in the hills overlooking Keuka Lake. After this, sessions resumed with Geoff Michael at Big Sky Recording, just down the road from the Ann Arbor violin shop where I worked by day. In addition to my TOBASOL bandmates, I leaned on friends from the local indie, jazz, and classical scenes to assemble my lush chamber pop opus which was released in July 2004, about eight years after I dropped out of college to work at a record store. 

I'd been studying the masters since childhood. Summer Cherry Ghosts was what I thought a first album was supposed to be: a tale begun with an exclamation point. A tribute to what came before. An exaltation of all the rock narratives I'd studied thus far and would continue to hold dear for years to come. As for that adage about having just one year to make your second album… it took me seven. - TM