The first studio recording featuring Echonest's live band Keith Lewis on Bass, Mike Lamardo on Drums, and of course (ya boi) Warren Sharp on Guitar.

We recorded a single take, no edits version to best capture what we do live. Three musicians in a room, no metronome, no over dubs, just straight up mathy jazzy goodness.

This was the 5th take we recorded of the song played all the way through. It's wasn't the most perfectly played but it's the one that felt the best. We must've played it 15-20 times in the studio that day and did some last minute arranging there (very stressful but super fun). I (ya boi) rented Nightsound Studios in Carrboro, NC for 8 hours and it took about 4 hours of setup and the other 4 for recording and it was down to the wire. When we recorded this, I was deep into my tendinitis and had also just met one of my guitar heroes who inspired him to put a heavy set of strings on his 8 string (not the smartest idea). Each take got harder and harder to the point that we had to take a short break to let the hands rest. A bit of stress never killed anyone though and made for a better story. At the end of the day, we got a righteous take of our signature song, one of the first songs we played together, our Jazz-Rock Odyssey, "Death with Benefits".

The name of the track comes from a much sillier place. Naming instrumental tunes is easily the hardiest part of being in this band. A lot of the songs start out from a cool riff rather than an emotion. Death is different in that it was a very emotional writing process letting the music write itself in a way. A good, strong name still didn't jump out.

A favorite podcast of mine is "Last podcast on the Left" and over the years, I've amassed a list of funny or interesting lines to use as song titles. "Vile Vorticies", "Oscar Dingus", and "the Night Snail" all come from old episodes. Death with benefits comes the Casey Anthony series and I'll just leave it at that. The juxtaposition of this 8 minute, very serious sounding tune named after a comedians take on a horrible murder (she did that shit) seemed irreverent enough for this genre and when you pay for the session (and don't tell anyone what the name of the song is until it's too late), you can do what you want.

We hope you'll enjoy all the work that went into this recording. 8 hours in a studio, somewhere around 15 hours of rehearsal space, and who even knows how many hours spent individually working on this jam. This recording was done back in February and has been available for streaming but it took some time for me to figure out that not everyone uses a streaming site (dumb guitarist again).

Dig them tasty licks.

Warren & the Echobois