Silverplanes is a “band” to watch. The moniker under which Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Aaron Smart records, Silverplanes will be releasing a trio of five-song EPs in the near future, all produced by the legendary Jack Douglas (John Lennon, Aerosmith, Who, Cheap Trick). In a cool move, Smart had a different well-respected engineer—including Jay Messina (Aerosmith, Kiss, Supertramp) and Geoff Emerick (Beatles, Badfinger, Elvis Costello)—mix each release. The first in the EP series is Gulfstream, out Friday and engineered by Shelly Yakus (U2, Tom Petty, Lou Reed).
The three releases come as a result of a creative burst in which Smart and his studio band—bassist Billy Mohler, keyboardist Matt Rohde and guitarists Jason Johnson, Rand Ray Mitchell and Sean Woolstenhulme—recorded 33 songs with Douglas. “This group of songs feels so vast to me,” says Smart. “There’s a lot of variation in the songwriting styles and recording approaches, but there are also some sonic threads that go through all of them. Musically, the EPs aren’t that far off from each other, other than the way we chose different styles of songs for each mixer. The common link in all of the EPs is my songwriting and Jack Douglas’ producing genius. They will all be released together at some point in a huge full-length with some extra bonus tracks.”
It was the veteran Douglas’ idea to bring in Yakus, Messina and Emerick to do the mixing and divide the output into EP-sized bits. “We had done one record of 15 songs, and then we decided to do another 18, because we were having so much fun,” says Smart. “Then we decided to release the songs as three EPs because we thought it would be cool to keep fresh material coming out in shorter intervals for the ADD generation.”
Now that Smart has a vast body of songs committed to tape, he’s getting ready to take the music of Silverplanes to people in a live setting. “I’m in the process of putting a live band together now, and I’ve put a lot of thought into how to present these songs on the road,” he says. “The people who played on the recordings are friends, and friends of friends, and it was all about ‘Lets record some cool sounds and make some recordings to stand the test of time.’ We never really thought, ‘How will we do this live?’ I would love to have all the guys that played on the record, but we’ll have to see where everyone is at in their lives when it’s time to go on tour.”
In the meantime, check out Gulfstream below. We are proud to premiere the EP today on magnetmagazine.com. Enjoy, and catch Silverplanes when they come to your town.
Gulfstream art after the jump.
