released November 11, 2021
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Mike Walker - acoustic & electric guitar, bass, keyboard, sampler, lyrics & vocals
Terrill Mast - piano, beats, synths, mellotron, marimba, melodica, electric guitar, drums, aux percussion & vocals
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Written, performed & recorded at home by Nature's Neighbor
Produced & mixed by Terrill Mast
Mastered by Seth Engel
Artwork by Mike Walker & Cheer Zhao
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Of all the albums I’ve made over the years, You Me and The People, the debut album from my previous band of the same name, was always the one that I wanted to revisit the most. This is for a few reasons. Reason number one being the fact that this album marks a very special time in my life where I feel my songwriting took a massive leap forward. It was also the time that I first began to truly collaborate with other musicians, which is the whole point of Nature’s Neighbor. Almost all the songs from the original YM&TP record are very solid and probably stand the test of time better than any other collection of songs from my college era, which lasted from 2011 to 2014.
The songs are all great and I’d hold them up against anything. The production on that album however is another story entirely. Which brings me to my second reason for revisiting these tracks. Let’s face it, back then I was self producing this album and I really had next to no idea what I was doing when it came to mixing. Basically, every song on the original album suffers quite a bit due to poor mixing choices. They are all very muddy, especially when it comes to the low end frequencies. I had no idea what EQ was and I also did a very crude job with the album’s mastering. So revisiting these tracks 10 years later gives us the chance to do them the justice they deserve by creating clear, richly detailed mixes and a nice warm master.
Now, one might ask the question, "why go through the trouble of re-recording these songs from the ground up?" If you want to revisit the album, why not just polish up the original mixes and remaster them? And my answer to that is that I wish I could, but sadly, all the original project files were lost when my old hard drive crashed. We will never be able to re-access the old mixes. They are forever lost. So the only option was to recreate the songs from scratch. And to be honest, even if it were possible, re-imagining these tracks was a lot more fun than simply touching up the old mixes.
It also just felt great to dust off this old album and dive back into it 10 years later. I was 21 when we originally released YM&TP and Terrill was just 19 years old. We were so young and proud of our creation and I remember handing this album out at so many basement shows back in 2011/2012. And the response we got from our peers and friends was very reassuring. Basically, everyone really loved this album when we put it out and for me it was the first time that I was recognized by my peers which really did mean a lot at the time.
Selecting the three songs to remake was also pretty easy. Terrill and I immediately chose these three tunes because we felt that they would fit well together. ‘Worst Storm’ is probably the one song from the YM&TP era that I have played live at nearly every NN show. Terrill and I played it every night on our 2015 tour. ‘Tankerbell’ is an old fan favorite and was an obvious choice for revisiting. ‘Converted Attic Space’ is definitely a deep cut from the original album but seeing as it was made exclusively by Terrill and I back when we lived together in 2011/2012, it also seemed ripe for revisiting.
I think that we have definitely achieved what we set out to do when we initially decided to revisit these tracks. We have successfully breathed new life into these three songs and have given them the re-appraisal that they always deserved. The dream is to one day revisit and remake all of the songs from the original album, releasing three at a time in a succession of little EPs until we finally have recreated the entire YM&TP album. But if that pipe dream never comes to fruition, we will at least have this EP to show that we were able to successfully recapture that magic from the original 2011 album, but this time in high definition. In a way, it felt like being a director going back to an old film that I had made early in my career and getting the chance to re-edit it in order to get a bit closer to the original vision.
So now, exactly 10 years to the day the original album was released, we give you YM&TP Mk2. For those of you that were around to hear the original album, we thank you for sticking with us and hope that you like these versions as much or maybe even more than the originals. For those of you that have never listened to the original 2011 release, here are some old tunes that mean the world to us and we hope that you can get something out of them. Enjoy the music.
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Original album:
youmeandthepeople.bandcamp.com/album/you-me-the-people
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