Scott Andrew’s Rec Room, Fall 2026

‣ Notes from the Studio: Meet Cheese
‣ Backward Glance EP available on Friday November 6!
‣ The new song: “The Muse (The Work Is The Wage)”
‣ Covers Club: Ken Yates, Pete Yorn

Hi folks,

I’m starting off the inaugural newsletter with a picture of a good boy.

Meet Cheese.

Cheese is allegedly a pit and lab mix, but his owner, audio engineer Shawn Simmons, thinks Cheese is actually a Blue Lacy. Everything that describes the Blue Lacy breed also describes Cheese: intelligent, high-energy, and intense. I’d add “aggressively affectionate” to that list.

Cheese joined Shawn and I at Studio Litho in Seattle back in early June of this year. The goal was to record a handful of songs that had been knocking around my brain since early January, just me and an acoustic guitar.

In past years, I’d record solo in my bedroom on my laptop. That would have been fine, I guess? But then I wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. Having a studio dog running around during your session is a blast; with Cheese, you need to understand that squatting down to their level is an invitation to get knocked over on your ass. You might find a dog toy deposited into your lap while you listen back to your guitar tracks. And you might have to wait in the vocal booth while Shawn fixes the compressor settings because Cheese changed them with his tail.

Things like that become part of the story of the recording. I feel it’s important to have stories these days. DIY recording and putting MP3s online for free used to be newsworthy! It’s not so remarkable anymore, and in fact it’s gone to new extremes with A.I. turning music into spam. You might not care that the microphone we used was from 1956 and worth more than my car, but it’s at least interesting, more than “I typed words into a text box and the computer made a song for me.”

P.S.: one of the songs from this session is “The Muse (The Work Is The Wage).” See below to download a copy for yourself. As for the other three songs, they’re coming along soon enough.

Pre-order the Backward Glance EP available on Bandcamp Friday November 6!

Check it out: my new EP Backward Glance will be available at Bandcamp on Friday, November 6 as a digital download and limited-edition CD. There are only 50 copies and you won’t find these tracks on Spotify.

What is Backward Glance? As the title implies, it’s a retrospective; six songs that I feel represent my best work. Each of these songs represents a moment when I asked myself “will I ever write a better song than this one?” Each song has been completely rebuilt from the ground up using the raw original tracks and given completely a new sonic arrangement using better equipment and, in some cases, better instruments! It’s an absolute joy to hear these songs breathe again.

You can pre-order Backward Glance here and immediately get a copy of the newly-reborn “Gravel Road Requiem” as a bonus. If you’re already a fan, I think you’ll like what you hear. And if you’re new here, you won’t even know!

The new song: “The Muse (The Work Is The Wage)”

If you’re reading this, you know that this summer I released a new song “The Muse (The Work Is The Wage)”. If you missed it, you can download it at the link below. I want to tell you about the story of this song, because the way it came together is…weird.

A little spooky, even.

(Don’t see a download link? Go subscribe!)

I’m not a religious person. I’m not even a “spiritual” person. Even so, there are times when the universe seems really weird.

The idea for “The Muse” came from an unpublished blog post I wrote ten years ago. Below is the original text. If you’ve listened to the song, you’ll notice just how much of the text ended up in the lyrics nearly verbatim:

The Muse is here. She's holding court up on Olympus, the very same Muse that granted inspiration to my heroes. She is the ultimate artistic collaborator, dispensing artistic bon mots: a cool chord progession, a too-clever-by-half verse, the elusive rhyme that's finally clicks into place. She's worked with Johnny Cash and Kit Marlowe and Frank Lloyd Wright and Amy Tan and Taylor Swift and every single Bronte sister and thousands of kids writing sad teen poetry for the first time.

And me. But I have to get her attention first. And she has no patience for posers.

I imagine the Muse attending to her true supplicants, the best of the best, while watching me out of the corner of her eye as I strum my guitar or doodle on paper. She wants me to bring something to the table first, even if it's crap. She pretends not to notice as I write some of the most cursed, trite, thuddingly boring and obvious lyrics. She offers nothing yet because this is part of the process. At the end of the session I'll have nothing but absolute trash, nothing worth keeping. This is also part of the process because the Muse wants to see if I come back anyway.

And a lot of times I don't come back. But when I do, something shakes loose. A single phrase. A rhyme. A kernel of a thought to hang some words and chords on. Table scraps from the very same banquet that feeds Bob Dylan. But I haven't earned an invitation to the feast. That's for lifers, and I'm a dilettante at best.

Scraps are all I can hope for, because while she's the ultimate collaborator, the Muse is not a project manager. It's not her job to deliver. That's my job.

So I hunch over my guitar like an early hominid searching for a pleasing rhythm by banging two sticks together. These days it helps to think of songwriting as a puzzle, something to be solved by teasing out phrases that support a thesis while adhering to a rhythm and occasionally rhyming. I suspect the Muse is drawn to puzzles because sometimes I'll be reworking the innards of some terrible verse and suddenly she'll be there, whispering directly into my ear "you ever notice how purple kind of rhymes with circle?" before sauntering off to see what David Byrne wants this time.

Above all, the Muse requires proof-of-work. Work is the price of admission, and I can tell you from experience that if you bring enough work to the table, the Muse will climb aboard her helicopter and absolutely airdrop ideas on your position. Be ready.

“The Muse” is a song about songwriting. In a way, it’s a song about writing that song. But in working the text into lyrics, things started happening that were described in the text. Stuff like incidental rhymes and lines that I don’t remember consciously writing, and secondary meanings that I only recognized later. I’m no lyrical genius, as evidenced by the ton of cringeworthy garbage I wrote on my way to finishing that you will never see. What I’m saying is: I wrote this song while also applying the concepts the song is about, and things got weird.

I went looking for The Muse by writing a song about looking for The Muse, and she threw me some crumbs. And that’s about the closest I’ve been to a spiritual experience.

The Covers Club: Ken Yates, Pete Yorn

The Covers Club is my covering whatever song I’m obsessing over, stripped down, one take, warts and all. It’s exclusively for subscribers (that’s you).

You don’t have to go too far outside of Seattle to find yourself in the wilderness. I was driving around the rainy backroads around Fall City and Snoqualamie Falls, trying to get out of my own head, when Spotify randomly served up “Quiet Talkers” by Ken Yates. I was immediately drawn into the hushed production and the mellow roots-rock vibe and I pulled over, engine off, listening to the track while rain tapped against the windshield in the dark. I’m still catching up with his back catalog.

This cover version is done finger-picked with alternate tuning, not exactly a folksong treatment but close!

I have loved Pete Yorn’s densely arranged “California cool, but dark” songwriting ever since I first heard “Strange Condition” in a grocery store in 2001. I’ll always associate his debut musicforthemorningafter with driving the 101 to San Francisco under autumn clouds, and I'll always think of hiking the sun-baked streets of Pasadena CA while listening to his 2019 album Caretakers. “All The Beauty” (from his latest album of the same name) doesn’t deviate from his tried-and-true “Santa Monica Pier at dusk” formula, and that’s fine by me.

Bye For Now

Thus endeth the first installment. Expect these missives from me once a season, with maybe an occasional quick reminder about a release or event. Call it a comeback or not, it’s going to be leisurely this time around, and I plan on enjoying myself.

Welcome! Or welcome back!

— Scott