The Clarkes are a San Francisco-based songwriting collaboration of Peter Weldon and Tony Johnson. Peter wrote the music, and Tony, the words and melodies. Sometimes we would work-out the melodies and words together. The original idea was to put a band together, but it was rather difficult finding musician’s to fill-out the band for one reason or another, so we spent most of our time writing songs and listening to a lot of music. For quite some time, we spent as much time listening to music as we did making music. After building up a fairly large number of songs, we started working on harmonies and incorporating a lot of harmony vocals in the songs. We eventually found a third person to join on 2nd guitar and adding a third harmony. Being that it was so hard to find others to round out the unit, we figured we had enough to work with for the time being, and worked on making the vocals (3-part harmonies) the main focal point. I had started recording the songs at home on my digital 8-track to work-out the songs in a more scrutinizing manner. The recordings seemed to sound good enough to ‘add’ the rest of what was in our heads to the tunes, so we simply built on the, recordings ... overdubbing bass, drums, piano, and various other instruments, using both hired-help, and friends who were kind enough to contribute their talent and time for free. The end result is our debut self-titled CD. Thanks to anyone who gives any of the tunes ear-time.
Cheers! Peter
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