Wichita musician David Lord’s new album, “Way Over The Rainbow” is out Dec. 12 on Lord’s own newly launched label Cloud Ear.
This inaugural release will be pressed on vinyl. It will be limited to 100 copies, a measure that Lord says is informed by his previous experience running a label and finding himself with a surplus of physical media. Some other recordings, he adds, will be issued in slightly higher numbers on vinyl, though those, too, will top out at around 250.
The record was recorded in 2020 at the end of a period Lord had spent making four albums in his Forest Standards series in Los Angeles with producer Chris Schlarb and musicians either from that area or Chicago.
With the sessions for “Way Over The Rainbow,” the focus is on guitarist Lord, bassist Dale Black and drummer Charles Rumback, each with roots in the Sunflower State.
Wichitan Sam Hake adds vibraphone to one track and guitar luminary Jeff Parker, known for his groundbreaking solo albums and work with the band Tortoise, contributes guitar to three pieces.
Lord said that he has several other releases already completed that will be issued in the coming years, a number of them featuring Rumback.
Lord recently spoke about making “Way Over The Rainbow” and how he’s become an accidental businessperson through his desire to have his music heard.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I know from talking to you in the past that an album often starts with a prompt or concept, whether it’s tunings or reharmonization. Was there any sort of prompt for this one?
It all kind of centers on “Over The Rainbow.” I actually did that arrangement in maybe 2003. It’s very old. It was one of my first experiments with reharmonizing a melody when I was working on my music extended Lydian polychordal system that I started developing around that time. It might be the first time I tried taking a melody and disregarding the chords and reharmonizing the melody that way and then writing several parts that kind of overlap.
So, I’ve had this arrangement sitting around for a very long time, and then finally I recorded it in 2020 with Charles Rumback and Dale Black. That was sort of the centerpiece of the album. Then I chose all the tunes around that. So, it’s a little bit more of a focus on the mood. I’m still using a lot of concepts from [the] Forest Standards [series] but it’s a little more thematic in the “Over The Rainbow” concept.
What was the inspiration for taking on “Over The Rainbow”? Was it a piece that you’d grown up liking or one that you formed a connection with when you were starting off as a musician?
Being from Kansas, of course, that’s the one thing you hear everywhere you go: Something about “Wizard of Oz;” it’s the only thing anybody knows about Kansas. I was never a big fan of the movie growing up; that didn’t really have any special meaning. But I think being from Kansas, at one point it dawned on me that in order to go over the rainbow you have to go through Kansas. That’s the portal to get over the rainbow in the movie. I like that concept. The song itself I never had a particular affinity for, but I think it was a fun one to play with, being a Kansas musician.
You recorded this with Charles Rumback in 2020, and although you had grown up in Wichita and he had grown up in Hutchison before moving to Chicago, you didn’t know each other.
He heard about my Forest Standards records and saw that this guy from Kansas was playing with all these musicians that he knew like Chad Taylor and Jeff Parker, people that he had worked with as well. “What in the world is going on? We know the same people, we’re from the same area.” He reached out to me, and we became friends just over the phone and so forth, just with that connection. Very like-minded musically; we’ve just been working together ever since.
This record was also a kind of homecoming for you. You’d made your four Forest Standards records in Los Angeles with producer Chris Schlarb, and you made this one primarily right here in Wichita.
That was another reason I thought it might be fun to start my new label and my new body of work post-Forest Standards with this one. This was recorded and composed in 2020 and maybe finished in 2021. Launching a label with a lot of the work done here, I thought the Kansas theme was kind of a nice start to it. With the label, it will be a lot of music that I’ve produced here, and then a lot of projects in Chicago that Charles is involved with, stuff I’ve done up there, things that’s he done with other musicians. It’s going to be kind of a Wichita-Chicago connection focus as far as our releases.
I’ve known you now for over 20 years, and I noticed fairly early on that you had the business side of the music business down as well as you had the creative part. Did you know much about the business side of things when you started playing and composing?
I’ve never thought of myself as being a businessperson, but I do run a music academy [Air House] that I’ve run for 17 years now, and it’s been a success. I’ve never had a business class in my life, so I guess anything I’m doing with that is coming naturally. But I don’t think of myself as being particularly drawn to that, but it sort of comes out of necessity. I want to put out music. Making music is one aspect of it, but I’ve also got to find a way to get it out there. It’s out of necessity that I’ve entered into the space of the music business, doing labels and so forth.
