A couple of years after their first collaboration New Cool Collective and Mark Reilly got back together in Amsterdam.. “Although I attended some rehearsals in Amsterdam to work on arrangements of song ideas NCC had put together, I deliberately didn’t present any song ideas apart from one. For me it would be an interesting challenge as the essence of collaborations is that creatively you arrive at a piece of work you wouldn’t have thought of if you had written everything yourself” Mark Reilly (Matt Bianco) explains.

In the middle of all this, the corona pandemic struck Europe. New Cool Collective and Mark Reilly had no choice but to continue recording from a distance. Mark Reilly: “It was quite daunting at first when NCC sent me 10 backing tracks from their live recording sessions to work on in my studio in the UK but I soon got into it, sending rough mixes back to them for comments as the tunes became complete with melodies, vocals, lyrics and sometimes re arrangements of the tracks.” After a period of intense online collaboration, the album began to take shape. “I started doing the mixes and sending them over to NCC for comments and after making a series of adjustments back and forth we arrived with an album we were all really excited about”

credits

released November 27, 2020

All compositions by New Cool Collective and Mark Reilly

All lyrics by Mark Reilly

Additional vocals (on tracks 1,3 and 7) by Elisabeth Troy

Excecutive producers: Joris Liebregt, Mark van den Bergh and Willem Friede

Recorded by Kasper Frenkel at Electric Monkey, Amsterdam NL
Additional recording - Vocals by Mark Reilly
Additional recording - horns by Joost Kroon
Additional recording - keyboards by Willem Friede

Mixed by Mark Reilly
Mastered by Sander van der Heide at Wisseloord Studios, Hilversum NL
Artwork by Meinder Verheggen