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I went up to Delmark Studio because they had just restored their old tape machine
and they said, hey, we want to do some test recordings with the tape machine we

just restored. Will you play our piano up here? We'll pay you for your time to just
come and play piano. I said sure, and I went up there and they sat me down when
I got in there and said, actually, you know, Delmark has a long history of piano

recordings, solo piano recordings and we'd like to do one with you. We'd like to do
a Johnny Iguana album.

I was floored. I was excited about it and as it would happen, I had been playing and

writing a lot and they had an engineer there and I went into the live room and I
played piano for a while and then I came back two other afternoons, just for a
couple of hours each time. Probably it was like five hours of being in the studio

and just doing takes of different
songs. We had the concept from
the very beginning that there

would be no edits.

There would be nothing digital
any step along the way. It would

be with their old 1917 Steinway
and miked up and recorded by a
tape machine, and then mixed

through the board, and mastered
onto a tape machine. That's just

exactly what it was. I was sold on
the concept when I went into the
control room and listened to it
because it sure sounded pure to

me [chuckles]. You know, a lot of
times you hear records and

obviously first of all, there's edits
all over the place, and it was very challenging not to have edits and take part of
one take and another take and punch in for a certain section to improve it because
you're so used to doing that. All the time on stage I'll play four minutes by myself,

but when you're doing that with the tape rolling, it's so easy to hear a part where
it sounds to you like you're about to go off the road, you know. So to get a full take

that I was satisfied with was a bit of a challenge. We did not take a long time doing
it. I had three really quite brief sessions going in there. Most of the songs I probably
only did one, two or three takes of.

BiTS: Are you actively promoting it? I mean, going out and playing tracks from the
album.

JI: I will be. It's coming out April 11th here and I've got a number of shows

scheduled that are going to be half and half solo piano and also duo performances