New Heart was my seventh studio album, and turned out to be my last solo album for about twenty years. Although I started recording it on a Tascam 4-track recorder, I ended up finishing it on the computer. I finally had enough computing power to record directly on the hard drive with a Digital Audio Workstation program. I started writing and recording it not long after Machine Dream was completed, but it took a while till I reached the finish line in June 2002. At the time it was clearly the best-recorded album with the strongest songwriting to date. But there were things I was dissatisfied with, chief among them the weak-sounding MIDI drums.
In 2009, after the release of the first Chameleon Red album, Transposition, I decided to use what I had learned, plus a new AI drum program called Jamstix, to re-do parts of New Heart. My acoustic guitar’s bridge was having issues, and maybe it just wasn’t the right time, but for whatever reason, I became discouraged and abandoned my efforts.
In 2022, after completion of my eighth solo album Postcards From the Whirlwind, I decided to go back and resurrect New Heart. I still felt like it stood up, overall. Unfortunately three of the songs, “Skies,” “What Used to Be,” and “Pariah” were backed up to a CD that became corrupted, so I had to re-record those from scratch. I also re-did “Pyrrhic Victory” because I felt the original version was not what I wanted it to be. The rest of the songs are either entirely the original recordings or the original recordings with some 2009 modifications. Whew! Talk about convoluted! The new version was released in early 2023.
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