“It was the ‘difficult second album’,” chuckles deep house dude, Fred Everything. He can laugh now, but that phrase was a spine shiverer, back in the day. “It was a miracle that it even came out,” he adds. “That’s why it’s called Light of Day, because we never thought it’d see it!”
Thankfully it did. A combination of label whip cracking, over-reaching ambition, and sheer perseverance saw to that. After his well-received debut in 2000, Fred wanted to up his game and start recording musicians. He was an artist now. Better act like one. “That first album was all samples,” he says. “Now I wanted to create my own.”
There was a steep learning curve, though. He’d never recorded anyone. “I didn’t even know how to communicate with them to get what I wanted,” he says. “It wasn’t easy at all.” But, the trick to doing it, is doing it. As Fred can attest. “There was a lot of experimenting,” he says. “And working with new people in new ways forces you to get better.”
Slowly he got more comfortable with recording everyone from virtuoso flamenco guitarists to imposing reggae vocalists (and their mildly excessive entourages). Not to mention taking that odd slice of crushing criticism from the top brass at the 20:20 Vision label, who would be putting the thing out.
“A lot of the original tracks just weren’t right,” says Fred. “I would be spending money on getting a guitarist
