Local musician Doug E. Rees recording latest album on phone, in unusual locales

Scratching his gray goatee, Doug E. Rees struggled to describe how he came to invest the past two years in making an album that's, in a way, inside-out.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe I'm a little crazy anyway."

His previous albums were made the usual way: write the songs, practice the songs while saving up for studio time, record the songs. His current -- and as-yet-unnamed -- project marks a radical departure. Instead of using a studio setup, he recorded most of the songs on his phone.

"I just realized, I'm a songwriter," he said. "If I'm ever going to get anything out of this, it's going to be from selling a song. Not the music of the song, though. Just the idea of the song."

He said about three years ago, he brought a song he'd written but never performed to his uncle's house. He showed it to his uncle Tim Nelson and fellow musician Nicky V. Hines and then recorded them all playing it.

Rees sits outside "The Shack" on Thursday just outside Jackson.Laura Simon

"The energy of that song," he said. "Maybe because I didn't have a microphone in front of my face, maybe because the other guys hadn't played it before. They kind of hung back a little and really flogging away whenever they felt more confident, I don't know."

He began collecting songs this way, piecemeal, until he realized he was making an album.

He then started getting creative about mobile recording, capturing one song with all the natural reverb of an abandoned church he found in Perry County.

"It's like a puzzle," he said.

And between writing the songs and finding the places and the people to record with, he's closing in on completing it.

Doug E. Rees hangs outside "The Shack," a rural outbuilding where he finds inspiration, on Thursday just outside of Jackson.Laura Simon

Eventually, he took the songs to a studio to have them mastered, but they still don't sound like slick studio tracks. They've got the warmth and charm of lo-fi or worn vinyl. And what they may lack in precision they make up for in presence. A fumbled chord in one song makes it feel not like a recording at all, but like someone wrote a song and wants to play it for you.

"If a song is good, if a lyric is good," he said, "it can be played on a ukulele out of tune and sound just fine."

The songwriting process, he said, is always changing. Sometimes, as another musician once told him, it's like having a baby; it just comes out of you then and there he said.

"Of course other times, you have to work to raise it," he said.

"They just got to hit me in the face hard enough that I got to write it. Sometimes it's a good thing you've got on your mind," he continued. "Sometimes it's something you're trying to write off your mind."

But the through-line, he said, is the energy.

"It's just whatever track provides that energy," he said. "It might not be and probably won't be perfect, but it'll have that energy. ... That was my idea."

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627