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On a spring-ish afternoon in the final weeks of winter, The Record Company returned to Studio Milwaukee and gave us a lesson in timing.
After opening the session with a new track, Chris Vos paused the music to chat with the audience about the band’s second selection: another brand-new song that happened to be 10 years old.
“This was going to be on the first record,” Vos began. “It was the 11th song, and what we chose … we chose that 10 was enough. We were like, ‘10’s perfect. We’ll save it for the second record.’ And then the second record, we wrote a pile of songs, and we forgot we had written this one. I mean, that’s God’s honest truth. We forgot.”
Timing has a funny way of presenting perfect opportunities, though. And with The Record Company preparing a deluxe edition of their Grammy-nominated debut album, Give It Back to You, the track — “Stay Up High” — suddenly found itself part of the collection for which it was originally intended.
The new/old song translated nicely to the session setup, which saw Vos, Alex Stiff and Marc Cazorla bring an acoustic approach to our room full of Radio Milwaukee members. Always at home on stage, the trio looked even more at ease as Vos returned to his hometown and reflected on the timing required for The Record Company to exist.
He launched into the origin story of moving out to L.A. after his wife, Valerie, traded her gig at the Shepherd Express for one at the Los Angeles Times — leaving him to do a bit of a rescue job on his future bandmates.
“They were about ready to quit the music business,” Vos recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m here. I only know how to do one thing. I’m going to do it.’ And it was really an odd situation, because I’m up on stage with Dobros [guitars] and harmonicas, and everybody else has got computers and stuff. I stuck out pretty bad, and it worked. Who knew?”
To close out the broadcast portion of the session, The Record Company showed just how well it worked — and still works — with their biggest hit from that first album, “Off the Ground.” Ten years later in an acoustic setting, it still hits as hard as ever.
