Christa Couture has released a surprise (sort of) new EP
Christa Couture released a brand new album and a brand new book last year, so it would only fair to not expect anything new from her for a while now.
But it turns out a little pandemic spring cleaning unearthed, well, Unearthed.
That’s what Christa’s calling her new EP, which is comprised of the demos from her sophomore album, The Wedding Singer and the Undertaker.
She stumbled upon them when she dragged a large green storage bin full of “work stuff” out of the closet and began going through it, she explained on Facebook. Amidst the hard drives of recording sessions, CDRs of live recordings and CDs full of publicity shots, there was also a mysterious CD called “Recorded at Blue Wave, June 2007.”
“I had no memory of what Blue Wave was,” she wrote. “I put it in the CD drive and pressed play. The memories returned and my heart fluttered.”
Christa had recorded The Wedding Singer… in the fall of 2007. In order to apply for a grant for it, she had recorded demos of three of the songs with her band at Blue Wave Studios: “Waterfall,” “”A Grief As This,” and “The Declaration of Spring.”
These were the demos. And Christa realized she loved them, possibly at times even more than the album versions of the songs. There is a tenderness to them, she explained. The songs are new. You can still hear the grief in her voice. The demo version of “A Grief as This” might actually be the best one they ever recorded.
“I wrote that song two months after my first son died, and the song is meant to have a tenderness, a rawness — not a messy rawness, but more like a kind of quiet,” she wrote. “By the time the horn section swells on the album version, some of that rawness was lost.
“In fact, the album version isn’t even the full glory Aaron [Joyce] composed — shortly before the album was mastered, I panicked and had the producer take some of the parts out. The result was neither what Aaron intended nor what I hoped for, and I later released the full scored version in 2011 on my EP Lost.
“But now I’m really in the weeds. Hearing these demos this week, I remembered how I had wanted that song to be.”
May 20 marked the 14th anniversary of the release of the Wedding Singer and the Undertaker. Christa marked that anniversary by releasing Unearthed.
