The Other Side Of Life: Piano Ballads

The inspiration for The Other Side of Life grew out of my love for artists like Lester Young, Chet Baker, Bill Evans and Coleman Hawkins - specifically their ballads. When I listen to their music, the rest of the world melts away and I sink into a blissful haze. I’ve regularly attempted to harness that feeling and pour it into my songs. With jazz having such a major inspiration on the way I approach songwriting, I figured let’s go straight ahead and make a Beach Fossils album where we perform our greatest hits in the style of jazz ballads. I decided to collaborate with some friends of mine who are formally trained jazz musicians. Tommy Gardner played drums on Clash The Truth and was a member of Beach Fossils from 2011 until 2016. On tour, whenever we were in a green room with a piano, Gardner would sit down and start improvising Beach Fossils songs in a jazzy style. He would be playing the melodies for the guitars, bass and vocals all together. It’s not like he rehearsed it, it would be the first time he’d ever attempted to play these songs, and it was always beautiful. I couldn’t understand how the fuck he learned all of that just from sitting behind the drum kit every night. For years I had the idea of turning these piano versions of Beach Fossils songs into an album, and in 2020 when touring came to a sudden halt, I reached out to Gardner and asked if he wanted to finally make this album. On The Other Side of Life, Tommy Gardner plays piano, saxophone and upright bass, Henry Kwapis plays drums, and I sing. As for my vocals, I’m not a jazz singer and I had no intention of altering my style for this record. The idea was for my vocals to be the common thread between the original versions and these new versions. A song by itself is naked, there are endless possibilities for how to dress a song and every choice creates a radically different outcome. Making this album let me step back and see these songs from a new perspective. I hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve done with them.