Presenting: Stone City Stragglers AMENDED 2023 - It's Never Too Late to Mend Remix
A LITTLE HISTORY | November 11, 2001 - The band I was in at the time – Ensemble Exu – just finished a show at the old Maple Tree Inn, in Blue Island. After the show, a fella approached me with a woman both giving me compliments on the show and my playing (By the way, if interested, I can send you a link to this very show). We got to chatting, and turns out he was a musician. Before he walked away, he gave me his phone number and asked if I’d consider being in a country band he was starting. I had just played a long set of music of the calypso, soca, reggae, afro-beat genres and was curious what he saw in that with country, and was a little apprehensive as I’d never played country before.
That fella was Brent James and the woman, his wife Karen Moats.

Throwing caution to the wind, and deciding to be open to something new, I soon found myself rehearsing at their house and the Stone City Stragglers were formed. We’d soon add Ali Moroni (Flood) on vocals, Karen on percussion and vocals. Brent already had bassist Josh Piet on board.
In 2002 we’d record our first album “Little Misfortunes & Innocent Mistakes” and soon recruit my friend and long time musical collaborator Phil Lazzari on guitar. From 2002-2004 we’d play the area and record a second record “The Last Resort”. With new bassist Johnny Gadeikis in 2005, we were writing our third album, “It’s Never Too Late To Mend”.
It was an exciting time, as I felt we were finally finding our own voice as a band. We’d been getting write ups locally, nationally, and overseas on our records, playing some great gigs including traveling to Canada for a big country fest. We were on WGN, had our previous indie record in distribution with Carrot Top records and were trying to get on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records. It’s the one band I was in that I thought had a real shot due to the talents of everyone involved and the efforts Brent put into promoting and trying to make it all happen.

‘Mend’ - we decided to do it on our own, in our rehearsal space with an early digital recording device: the Yamaha AW4416. We’d write, produce, and mix the album ourselves and send out for mastering. We put out the record ourselves and got some reviews, play a bit more. Soon after – the band fell apart, and the machine had a hard drive issue and we lost data for this recording. Bummer.

Within the past few years, I’ve been recording and mixing my own music. Besides ideas, my technical knowledge behind recording and mixing at the time of “Mend’ was minimal. A few months ago I was listening to a track from the record, and on a lark wondered if Phil might still have data from the album and if I could possibly remaster it to reach a vision I personally had for the record, but certainly did not have the technical ability or articulation in 2006 to make it happen.
So, I initially started just a remaster from the original stereo track assuming our data was all but lost for the entire record due to our hard drive issue. But Phil came around with several data backup discs from the sessions! I popped them into my Mac, but ran into a roadblock – the data was a special file format from the Yamaha machine and I could do nothing with it. I did some research and found a guy on Facebook who wrote software to extract this data to usable WAV files. Now all I had to do is run the software from a spindle full of discs and extract/convert the data to see what we had to work with. Turned out, we had drums and bass for nearly every song, and a few incidentals for a few tracks as well. While this was not everything, this was precisely what I wanted to focus on when tweaking the record. Now I could actually dig into the rhythm section and remix it, massage it, and mold it into the original stereo mix with the other instrumentation. That’s what you’ll experience here along with a reimagining of the song sequence.
ENJOY my reimagined, long-play format!
Thank YOU for reading, listening, and supporting local music.
~ Bret