Both Albums + Signed Czech Style Handbill
In 2018, with the money from the few Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset shows he was able to play, Richard Edwards bought a house where he could raise his daughter. With the debilitating C Diff that abruptly ended his life as a touring musician and nearly derailed his solo debut “Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset”behind him a plan was hatched to record a follow-up album in Nashville. During the renovation of the abandoned house, he began writing a batch of songs that were both stranger and more surreal than anything that he had written before. For the first time in a long time, the future as bright. But as the story goes, fate sticks out its foot.
The morning after Thanksgiving he woke to extreme abdominal pain and within three days had lost 35 pounds. The illness and weight loss intensified, and after several hospitalizations in Indiana he was taken to Cleveland Clinic, yielding some minor short term relief but no cures and no answers. It became clear that travel was no longer an option. No trip to Nashville. No recording studio. No clear treatment plan for his condition. Only these songs echoing through this house.
Suddenly missing 35 lbs but in possession of a new batch of songs audibles were called and new plans drawn up. In the hopes of recording remotely between hospital stays, he pawned his Margot era artifacts and cobbled together enough money together to purchase a Heiserman Tube 47 microphone, Coil Pre Amp, and a compressor—equipment he would be forced to learn himself for any hope of recording new music. Tech savvy friends slowly descended upon the house in progress which had taken on the name “Lemon Cotton Candy Sunset House” to install video monitors and the requisite equipment to beam in to the dozens of Los Angeles studios that would end up giving birth to these albums conceived in increasing solitude.
During one of the endless nights of Youtube tutorials while attempting to learn how to use this new home studio, he stumbled upon a video of pianist Dave Palmer performing “Why Try and Change Me Now?” live at the Largo with Fiona Apple. The following morning Edwards called Palmer and professed his plans to begin a long-term collaboration with him. Dave accepted this unusual proposal from the unusual and unusually skinny young man and the two began making piano demos of the songs Edwards had committed to tape with his 1956 J45, written in between renovation related work while dancing in this new home/self contained creative prison hub. Meanwhile, Edwards discovered the work of UK artist Alistair Little and invited him to render the visual turmoil of this period.
Edwards and his failing abdomen would spend the next half decade confined to his house in Indiana, losing weight, attending telehealth visits with European gastro doctors and making art, escaping only once for ketamine therapy in Chicago—a trip that ended up inspiring an entirely new album, Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw as well as two screenplays about time, memory and love written simultaneously to the writing and recording of Ghost. As he and his Los Angeles collaborators dialed in their working methods for this unorthodox approach to making recorded work, they just… kept going. Rather than the process being relegated to a one or two off series of sessions to get an album made under difficult circumstances, it became a daily full time job over the half decade spent trapped by a body.
Edwards and Palmer’s creative collaboration would go on to yield five full-length albums, two film scores, and a 3xLP box set, each showcasing Little’s artwork on the cover. Two of those albums were comprised of original songs written during the most challenging physical period of the songwriter’s life. In a 20 year career and nearly as many albums, these two are the dearest to him. They’ve long been out of print and never truly released in their definitive form. That is what this story is about.
The following essay was written by Soraya Sebghetti and read by Judy Greer.