THE MAKING OF TIBERIUS’ ‘TROUBADOUR’

by Brendan Wright

Since I moved to Boston in the fall of 2019, I usually tell people I’m on a year-to-year contract.

One, and more obviously, because my lease runs year to year; however, I feel like every year since then, my life has had an undeniably different flavor with each year I experience here. Troubadour captures one of those years.

Writing (Fall 2022 – Fall 2023)

I didn’t intend to write Troubadour in chronological order, but that’s more or less how it happened. In the fall of 2022, I was ruminating on my place in Boston and what role I wanted music to play in my life. I had friends who were moving to New York to play music full-time, and I was feeling insecure about my place in the world. I showed “Sag” to my band to help flesh it out. Ben Curell and I workshopped it together and then brought it to KP and Christian in the Sound Museum – a decrepit warehouse turned practice space. I think that was at the very beginning of 2023, right before they tore that building down. It was the last of an era for that iteration before Christian moved down to New York to pursue his band Trophy Wife more seriously, and Ben started to dedicate more time to Clifford, pulling out of Tiberius live shows.

<a href="https://tiberiuswright.bandcamp.com/album/troubadour-2">Troubadour by Tiberius</a>

On a personal level, it was the beginning of a shift for me. I was fairly fresh out of a breakup and was spending a lot of time looking for distractions. Instead of tackling some bigger questions and engaging in a healthy recovery, I was tucking away my feelings into compartments and distracting myself with casual dating. At the same time, I was experiencing a lot of shame and guilt in doing that. From here, “Tag” and “Felt” started to come out.

<a href="https://tiberiuswright.bandcamp.com/album/troubadour-2">Troubadour by Tiberius</a>

Ben and I shared a practice space at the time – a temporary rehearsal room for those who’d been displaced from the sound museum – where we worked on fleshing out “Felt” and “Tag” that spring. We had a few other tunes around that time that were probably going to be on the record, but nothing that got completely fleshed out. At the time, I was focusing a little more on releasing tracks for our then upcoming mini LP ‘Fish in a Pond.’

<a href="https://tiberiuswright.bandcamp.com/album/fish-in-a-pond">Fish in a Pond by Tiberius</a>

That spring I ended up in a short but intense relationship that ended almost as soon as it started. The experience was the catalyst for a more thorough period of more self-reflection, examining the sources of my self-worth. When I look back at that time, I don’t love the person I was, and while I’ve learnt to give myself more grace in recent times, it’s still hard to see how destructive I could be when I let my emotions get the best of me.

Because it was summer, I was off from work for a few months. I spent a few weeks away from Boston and everything in it, and when I returned home, three out of my five roommates had moved out in preparation for our new lease cycle. The night I got in, I sat in our bare kitchen, and “Moab” just seeped out.

<a href="https://tiberiuswright.bandcamp.com/album/troubadour-2">Troubadour by Tiberius</a>

In the weeks that followed, I slept most of the day and stayed up most of the night in the basement working on demos. It felt easier to be awake when there weren’t any distractions. Out of that month came “Barn,” “It Has to Be True,” and “Redwood.”

When I returned to work in September, every day felt exhausting for a while. I spent a lot of time walking around different parks in the greater Boston area, staring at the trees. I found a lot of solace in sitting with them and practising my breathing. I was also reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act at the time. Soon, “Sitting” and “Painting of a Tree” followed.

(Recording Fall 2023 – Fall 2024)

That October Ben and I went to the Record Co to record the drums for “Sag,” “Felt,” “Tag,” “It Has to Be True,” and “Barn.”

At the time, Ben had begun to cut back on live shows, leaving more opportunity for Sam to play around with some of the new unfinished tracks in the live setting. While it was agreed Ben would finish the recordings for the record, the arrangements that KP, Sam, and I came up with had an influence on how the arrangements of tunes like “Painting of a Tree,” “It Has to Be True,” and “Moab” would come to be.

In the time after the studio, I built the tracks in my room and in the basement, following the demos I’d made. The majority of the recording was done by myself. I liked the “Barn” demo so much I actually slowed Ben’s drums down from the studio and mapped them onto the demo. I think in retrospect, I maybe should have rerecorded that one from scratch, but oh well.

I had made this original demo of “Redwood” that I really liked – it was slow and fingerpicked, and I wanted to have that be a part of the record as well. I ended up just tagging it onto the “Redwood” recording and adding a lot more ambience.

All of the bass, with the exception of “Sitting,” was overdubbed in my room by KP. Additionally, Christian overdubbed his guitar parts for “Sag.”

I really wanted slide guitar on the record and ended up trying to write makeshift slide parts with a lighter I had bought from a friend’s band as merch. I laid my guitar down on my lap like a steel. Coincidentally, at the end of 2023, my good friend Pat got a pedal steel and was starting to teach themself how to play it. Within a month of receiving it, we added them to the lineup. They recorded on the record as they were learning how to play it.

I continued to work on overdubs for the record during the spring and summer of 2024. Additional guitar was recorded by Rowan Martin in my room, sax by Nicholas Zabit, and some backing vocals by Julia Perry.

I generally mix as I record, but towards the end of that summer, I leaned on Nate Scaringi for a lot of help to make the tracks really shine. I would send bounces to them, and they would give me advice on how to mix things to hear them better. We sat down in my room with my sessions a few times, and they would pull up plug-ins and show me what I could do to bring certain elements out. Especially the guitars. It was immensely helpful.

Troubadour was mastered by Joni Elfers at Prism Analog in Portland, ME. After sending the record back and forth a few times, I had the completed masters in the fall of 2024.

Reflection (2025)

When you look at any artist’s discography in chronological order, you can hear an artist grow and evolve their art over the course of their career. Something that I think is a bit unconventional about the Tiberius discography is to see just how little I knew what I was doing when I started.

I started making Tiberius music a decade ago, in the spring of my senior year of high school. Despite being a musician – of sorts – I had no training in recording and had yet to find a voice for songwriting. And that really shows in the early Tiberius. To me, it’s borderline unlistenable. But it was my outlet to try things. To fail. And to try to be as honest with myself as possible. It was my therapy for a long time (I’m very glad to have found a real therapist).

Although some days I really wish I’d take it down, I keep all those recordings on my Bandcamp. Everyone’s got to start somewhere, and those recordings are the reason I can make the records today.

Over time, I learnt to hone it in, but I’ve always strived to make records that push me out of my comfort zone and to be unapologetically honest – but often, to some degree, apologetically honest. As a result, I end up cringing at a lot of material I make.

Troubadour is a record I’m really proud of, but like most of my records, I feel pretty weird about it. I don’t feel the way I did when I wrote it. All of the associations and inspirations for writing are very far removed for me now. To go back and revisit them as other people are hearing about them for the first time is a strange experience.

To me, Troubadour is a collection of stories from someone who lived where I lived years ago. It’s not about the person I am now.

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