In 2000,  having just finished almost a decade playing, recording, touring in the band Converge, my oldest friend Jeff Feinberg (pictured entering a Who concert, of course) came to me and offered to put out the record that my band Dreadnaught was about to begin recording.  This was the first album to be made in our trio format, and we all needed help taking care of the non-musical stuff - we had our hands full with the booking alone.

As usual, it took us a little longer than expected, but THE AMERICAN STANDARD came out on the newly-minted Red Fez Records in November 2001 and Dreadnaught hit the road.  Not too long thereafter, Jeff, always and forever wiser than I, realizing that intelligent people get real jobs and build toward a secure future, opted out of the label and handed it off to me.

From 2001 to 2005 Red Fez steadily worked on music projects by and with our pal Ed Jurdi (now of the Band of Heathens), Museum of Science (featuring Jon McCormack from Order of Thieves and the still-hairy Jamie Perkins, now of Taylor Momsen's The Pretty Reckless), Thanks to Gravity (featuring Andy Happel, who has produced many great recordigngs for my company PARMA Recordings), former Dreadnaught guitarist/songwriter Ethan Bessey,  The Screen, Duncan Watt, Shaun Michaud (now Lead Engineer at PARMA and Dreadnaught's collaborator for almost two decades), and many more.

In 2005, coming off a studio record on the Big Balloon Music label in Seattle, Dreadnaught signed a deal with the now-defunct Italian company Comet Records in Milan for the double-disc LIVE AT MOJO album (clearly, we did them no favors) and in 2006 our previous two records were reissued by the Russian MALS label.  In 2007 Big Balloon and Red Fez together released Dreadnaught's HIGH HEAT & CHIN MUSIC, by which point my company PARMA was soon to launch and take up, well, all my time.

In 2012 while cleaning my home studio I found a cassette tape we had recorded on my 4-track exactly 10 years prior.  On the tape were a bunch of Dreadnaught tunes that we had not been able to record properly at the time but decided to capture as, yes, a time capsule.  A time capsule which we promptly forgot about after making it.  Rather negates the whole conceit, doesn't it? 

Regardless, that tape kicked off a series of sessions which resulted in HAVE A DRINK WITH DREADNAUGHT (2013), GETTIN' TIGHT WITH DREADNAUGHT (2015), and the upcoming HARD CHARGIN' (2017), all on the Red Fez label.  So it seemed to me that the release of our new album might be a good opportunity to pull together some of the music we've all been making over the years - stuff like Dreadnaught guitarist Justin Walton's solo albums, or the music Rick Habib and I have recorded with Jon McCormack as Order of Thieves, or even some of the live material and outtakes we've accumulated - if only so we ourselves know where to goddam find it.

Oh, and about Feinberg, as of this writing he's about to hit the road again with his band. In Europe. Cue Pacino.

Bob Lord
April 2017