Wisconsin indie-rockers Redshift Headlights completed tracking their fourth studio album with legendary recording engineer Steve Albini in March of 2024. Albini passed away two months later. The self-released album, entitled If You Are Around Still, comes out Friday, July 12th on their redshiftheadlights.bandcamp.com page and via all streaming and online platforms. The 9-song album blends influences from rock, country, progressive rock genres and explores life, love, loss, and nostalgia. The album marks a shift toward rock and away from the more layered and orchestral pop arrangements from their previous three records.
All songs on the album were written collaboratively by the four core longtime members of the band, Stephen McCabe (vocals/guitar), Dean Hoffman (vocals/bass), Jay Spanbauer (guitar), and Justin Mitchell (keyboards). Chris Sasman joined the band in summer of 2023 after most of the songs had already been written but he breathed new life into each.
Today Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the video for the standout track “If You Are Around Still.” Bringing to mind the now famous Recording Josephine video of Magnolia Electric Co. working with Albini, this captures the vibes in Albini’s Electrical Audio. The band delivers a word of fiery rock that veers nicely into the realm of power pop, punk, and garage rock to make for a full sound that balances grit and precision. The video offers a glimpse of the work that goes into cutting a tune and one can only imagine the standards Albini enforced as he worked with the band.
Watch the band’s video of “If You Are Around Still” filmed in the studio and read their remembrance of recording with Albina below…
RECORDING WITH STEVE ALBINI (2024)
One Saturday morning in January, Stephen was sitting at his computer and thought of Steve Albini at Electrical Audio. His friends from bands like IfIHadAHiFi, H. Chinaski, and Cavernlight had all driven the three hours to Chicago to record at the legendary studio. He went to the Electrical Audio website and looked at the studio cost and at Steve Albini’s daily engineering fee. The band had played enough shows and had enough money to record for one day at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini in Studio A!
So, Stephen composed a very formal email to the studio inquiring about “Mr. Steve Albini’s availability” and the hope to record the full 9-song album with him in one day. He included a description of their timeline and a link to the demos they’d recorded live at The Salon and then he clicked “send.” Within an hour, Stephen had gotten a reply that began with “Hey I’d be happy to work on your record but I think trying to track the album in a day is overly ambitious.” It went on to explain and then was signed “steve albini.”
To Stephen it seemed incredible (but fit Steve Albini’s reputation and lore) that he would directly respond so quickly to an inquiry from a nobody indie rock musician from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The added complication for Stephen was that he had not even brought this idea of recording with Albini at Electrical Audio to the band and now he’d have to try to get everyone on board with this somewhat crazy, expensive, and likely stressful and risky idea, which took some time but eventually everyone went with it.
The following month came with many ups and downs in scheduling and rehearsing and getting ready to record on Friday, March 8th and Saturday, March 9th. The band planned to just record all of the music live, then bring the ProTools files back to Oshkosh on a drive and do a few overdubs (mostly keyboards and Jay’s guitars) and record vocals (at The Salon and Big Garage Studios). The plan was for Dean to take the helm mixing at The Salon with the band there to produce. Since the band was going to mix themselves using a computer, this led Steve Albini to inform them of the following: “In my normal work I’m an analog engineer, meaning I use tape machines and a mixing desk to make records. If the session is ultimately going to be concluded in ProTools…that will require an assistant to operate ProTools.” This second engineer ended up being Lauren “Mac” MacDonald, an amazing engineer and person.
On March 8th, the band climbed into a few vehicles with a bunch of amps and instruments and headed for Chicago, picking up their pal Colin Crowley from Wisconsin Public Television to capture the session by eventually filming nearly 5 hours of video footage. When they arrived, they were met by an intern, the studio manager Taylor and the EA technician Brian and they began loading in. Steve Abini was in the control room getting set up when they first walked into the studio and it took a few minutes for the band to make contact with him. The first thing Albini said to them was, “Nice to meet you. Before we get too far, let me explain a few things about that front door, in case you need to go out and smoke or jerk off, or whatever…” The band laughed and from that moment the tension of meeting a musical hero and recording legend was gone.
Over the course of that Friday and Saturday, the band and engineers worked diligently to record the album’s nine songs, only doing a few punch-in’s here and there. This left the album feeling and sounding basically like a live album, because it really was. Even without vocals, the songs and the album were there. The band and the engineers were pretty focused throughout, but there was a little down time and there was time for Steve to tell stories about playing with Shellac and about buying the Electrical Audio building and gradually funding its two-studio configuration. Day two ended with Steve calling the band into the control room to listen to the full album sans vocals and then he congratulated them and said, “Well, I have to go home to make my wife dinner now,” and that was the last time they saw or communicated with Steve Albini.
The band returned to Oshkosh and quickly began doing keyboard and guitar overdubs along with tracking vocals. Then, in early May, while they were in the middle of nearly daily mixing sessions, the band learned that Steve Albini had suddenly passed away. It was a stunning and somber and tense day of calls and texts. The whole world was thinking about Steve and his incredible catalog of songs and the legendary recording work he’d done. The band was in the midst of something they’d never anticipated. They had hoped to just go down to Chicago and record with one of their musical heroes and go home to Oshkosh and release the record, tour behind it as needed, and then move on with their lives.
But Steve Albini’s death put Redshift Headlights in kind of an uncomfortable position when considering how to release and promote the record, especially in light of the five hours of video Colin Crowley had captured, which may have been some of the last high-quality video of Steve Albini recording at Electrical Audio. Was there any way to release the album and promote the music without exploiting Steve Albini’s death and coming across as trying to capitalize on the media attention his passing had inspired worldwide?
These were the questions at the heart of the band’s release of “If You Are Around Still,” an album that was titled long before Albini passed but a title that also seems to refer to bands and mortality. The album was titled after some personal losses members of Redshift Headlights had experienced over the past decade. Two members of Redshift Headlights are over 50, two are in their forties, and one is in his thirties, so the band isn’t interested in “making it” or cashing in, or touring, or really any kind of notoriety. Redshift Headlights, at its heart, is just a band of lifelong friends who enjoy music and art and who like to spend time making it, whether people are listening to it or not. They feel lucky to have had a few precious days with Steve Albini, to get to talk with him and learn from him and laugh with him, but everyone in the band has had lots of experiences by this age and everyone has lost friends, and family members, and musical heroes, and not too far down the road they’ll be gone too because, you know, that’s just how it goes.
2 Responses
great song – rip steve!
This is an excellent song and the rest of the album is going to be just as good! Oshkosh rocks!