Planetary Nights is the brainchild of Robert J. McSweeney. The story of how this project came together is one of those great life lessons; never judge a book (or CD in this case) by its cover.
In January of 2008, The New York Times ran a story in the Real Estate Habitats section on the Harlem Brownstone we renovated. About a week later I got an email from someone who said they read the article, checked out my band website, liked my production work and asked if I would be interested in producing a couple of tracks on him. Well, having been through trying to find a singer for my band by putting an ad in the paper and being shocked by some of the frightening CDs that come to you in the mail, I wasn't holding out a lot of hope.
As it turns out, I wasn't very inspired by the CD I received and just continued on with other work. However, a few days later I received an email suggesting I must not be interested since I never wrote back. So I responded to him that if he wanted the kind of work he had heard from me, I would want to do everything from scratch, here was my price and figured that would be the end of it. Surprisingly, he agreed and sent me a cassette tape in the mail and a check.
Well, this time the tape was just a raw demo of him singing into a tape recorder and strumming an acoustic guitar. Suddenly, without the production of the CD I first heard there were some really cool songs that just needed some polishing and I really got into the work of making these two songs as great as I could. At the end of those two songs, he was happy with my work and asked if I was interested in doing more. I said I was and then two songs turned into five, then eight, then eleven and finally fifteen!
The music on this CD has a very American rock 'n roll sound to it. Bob's voice is somewhere between Tom Petty, Neil Young and maybe Gordon Lightfoot. The CD has some balls out rockers (Road Trip, NYC) as well as some heart felt ballads (Ebony Eyes, Try It Again) and even a bit of country flavor.
