Wildest Rose by Adam Sweeney

This album started out as one big experiment.

When folk singer-songwriter Adam Sweeney built his home studio, he needed some songs to record. Nothing serious, just a few tracks to put his new equipment through the paces. But his band, The Jamboree, had already recorded most of his new material for their full-length debut album due for release in Spring 2011.

Since this wasn't a serious project, Sweeney did something the perfectionist troubadour would normally never do – he decided to mine his journals for old songs that never quite made the cut for one reason or another. He dusted off a few that looked promising: a half-complete banjo instrumental, a rambling folk ballad, a brooding confessional piece, a country pop tune, and a loungy Paul Simon tribute written purely as a songwriting exercise.

But once he started recording, he discovered that these songs had a whole lot more to offer than he'd ever given them credit for. He also found himself having way more fun in the studio, taking things less seriously, playing every instrument himself (except for drums), experimenting with new sounds and going in directions he wouldn't normally have tried.

The result is this collection of roughly polished and distinctly colorful tunes: Wildest Rose.

adamsweeney.net