This debut solo record by Ric Albano was released in digital format on October 24, 2020. The tracks of original songs were all composed by Ric Albano with Ric recording each and every instrument of this truly “solo” record. Out There Somewhere was an un-planned record, directly resulting from the conditions surrounding the 2020 pandemic. The latest Sinclair Soul album, The Good Guys, was released near the end of 2019 and Ric expected to spend several months touring and promoting that record in 2020. However, with the sudden absence of live music opportunities and the overall closure of many aspects of society, Albano had much unexpected time to compose new music.
The Good Guys was the most ambitious album of my career. It had a production arc of nearly two years and featured a total personnel of seven, including a few guest musicians and a total of four producers and engineers. Further, that album was not only the most expensive but it featured the most complex recording sessions as I had recorded at the brand new 8 Days a Week studios for the first time. With this monumental project completed, my main goal for 2020 was not to make new music but to get out and promote The Good Guys by playing a lot more live gigs. Boy, was I in for a surprise.
The year started as planned. I had some gigs in January, February, and also one in March – a Sunday afternoon show on the very day when all the COVID stuff broke. In fact, my wife and I were going to head to a Steve Hackett concert right after my gig but it got canceled while I was playing. In fact, the coffeehouse where I played that afternoon, and which I had played dozens of times, would not have live music again for years to come. It was a very surreal moment.
As the COVID issue went from “Just 15 days” to months on end, I started doodling around on the guitar and coming up with new music. Somewhere around late April or early May 2020, I decided that I would try to do a solo record from home with very simplistic arrangements. However, once the creative spicket was fully on, it was hard to regulate the flow. I started writing a whole bunch of new material, so much so that I decided that this would not be a single album, but one solo record and a future group Sinclair Soul record. This was due not just to the quantity of songs, but because there were some songs I was developing that I felt were just too strong for me to try to do completely on my own. So “I split the baby” (the exact day I came up with the concept for “Big Orange Cat”) and my next focus would be on deciding which song went on which album. By the end of this process there were 26 total songs, 13 a piece (although three were ultimately cut from the 2021 Sinclair Soul album The Girl with No Name which ended up with 10 tracks). I decided that the solo stuff will come out first in 2020 and the group stuff will come out the following year.
With this method, I knew that the Ric Albano solo record would not be the strongest musical statement of my life so I looked at it mainly as something experimental a trial balloon if you will to see what I can do completely independently. All instrumentation and vocals were done by myself alone, with the only real outside collaboration being some coaching by drummer Ron Simasek who let me use his drums to record where I did play drums and the mastering done by Bret Alexander post production. Another goal of the solo album was to make the songs as close to real life incidents as possible, leaving some of the more abstract and fantastical works for the group album thematically.
Songs from Out There Somewhere
- Mercy for Discipline (2:58)
- Robin the Oriole (3:21)
- Tangytown (3:29)
- Sweet Emily (4:47)
- The Truth Is (Out There Somewhere) (6:47)
- Redemption (3:35)
- Country Blues #72 (4:43)
- Hanging Gardens of Babylon (3:30)
- Wasted (3:49)
- Oceans (3:35)
- Donovan’s Dread (3:13)
- Big Orange Cat (3:38)
- If It All Fell Down (1:59)
Produced and Engineered by Ric Albano
Mastered by Bret Alexander
All songs composed and arranged by Ric Albano
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