Seven Years 'Through the Fire'
An Overextended Synopsis
I recorded Through the Fire in a one-room, hand-built basement cave/studio nestled below the banks of a koi pond in an overgrown garden at the back of a property in Fremantle...in between tour dates and severe bouts with C-PTSD. The writing/production process kept me willing—nay, determined—to stay alive.
For most of the three or so years that I spent laying down tracks for the album, my social circle was largely confined to a little grey cat named Pia and a big, beautiful koi named Roi. If they spotted me at the studio around dinner time, they would each rush up to me. Otherwise, they would often hang out at the edge of the pond together, staring at each other.
My production resources on Through the Fire were limited, to put it very mildly. I tracked everything on the record using my one lap dobro, one amplifier, two mics, a small MIDI keyboard, and a 13-year-old MacBook—through the same 8-channel mixer I use onstage with my PA. My audacious approach to learning how to make a record was... Make. A. Record.
I'd shown up in a stark, oddly beautiful, sparsely-peopled land with a duffel bag, a guitar case, and an amplifier. When the shit hit the fan, I worked with what I had. My music is my guardian; my protector. My songs are my confidants. It has always been that way.
Previously, I'd only ever made records with the help of wonderful, experienced studio pros in real-deal facilities. This time around, the only engineer I had access to & could afford was: Me.
I should put that in quotes..."engineer". I mean...I'd never engineered or mixed a record before.
I mixed the album 6 different times from 2018 to the end of 2021. Each time, I threw out most of my work and started fresh with slightly more of a clue.
I went back and forth thinking, "I should get somebody else who's done this before to mix it...But how in thunder is that going to happen?" As the old joke goes, I could barely afford to pay attention...much less pay for a mixing engineer. I pulled myself up the learning curve by my fingernails and teeth—a technique that got me through most things/days in those years.
I stayed hidden for much of 2015 into 2020, except for getting onstage. Notably, I didn't send a single newsletter to my mailing list subscribers between mid-2015 and mid-2022. I never did a single live-streaming performance during The Plague. Truth is, I couldn't bring myself to show my face to the folks back home.
Why? Because I felt like I was the stupidest thing that had ever drawn breath. I'd all-to-ceremoniously and abruptly bailed on 10 years of slogging it out onstage in America—first in NYC clubs, then on the road, crisscrossing the States playing up to 200 shows/year...in the midst of making a decade-culminating album in Tupelo...into an abject nightmare. I free-fell into my Happily Ever After Gone Wrong—and the next thing I knew, I was excruciatingly alone on the underside of the planet, being assured at point-blank range with calculated, insidious persistence for a few years that I was worthless, and that I'd be better off dead.
After a while, it seemed undeniable.
One of the double-binds of narcissistic relationship abuse is the trap of self-isolating—due to shame over the ludicrous horrendousness of the experience—at the exact moment one desperately needs others to have their back, and needs to feel some sense of genuine belonging. So, I hid I did...out of crippling shame about my choices...about the cold & cruel Gehenna I had so exuberantly, blindly thrust my life into—lured by sham love into a cult of one bent on stripping me down to a frangible twig.
Oddly enough, the aftermath of my first few Oz years gave me a big head start on the whole social-distancing/lockdown/shelter-in-place festivities we all know way too much about by now. It's weird, maybe...but I suddenly felt less alone when the rest of the world joined in and went into lockdown and isolation in 2020-21.
At one point, I didn't touch Through the Fire for a year. The isolation and trauma/flashbacks had become crushing for a time. All I could do was focus on stabilizing and strengthening enough to rescue my sense of self. I had my songs & my tour schedule, and I had a 15-point self-care daily checklist and a strict regimen...everything from oil-pulling to mindfulness meditation, super clean diet, cold plunges, the Indian Ocean, Ba Gua, breath work, and so on...plus, the invaluable coaching of an expert in recovering from narcissistic relationship abuse.
I could only manage minimal one-on-one interactions during this period. Instead, I focused on sharpening and deepening what I do onstage...one-to-many...many strangers, that is.
As it stands, I've given my very best performances to date in remote little antipodean towns you'll never hear of, in front of nobody who knew me. Quite often, very few cared one way or the other whether I was there or not...much less cared about who I was or what I was up there making such an impassioned racket about.
A cover song busker in Perth put it in perspective for me once...referring to the time in rural Western Australia when I had a very drunk, very loud woman swaying 6 inches in front of my microphone during one of my songs. As I sang my heart out, she kept screaming in my face through flammable sputum, "BOB DYLAN!!!! PLAY!...BOB!!...DYLAN!!!"
The busker shrugged and said, "People don't know what they like—they like what they know."
To drive point all the way home not long thereafter, a friendly & entirely sincere gent came up to me after a set and said, "I think you're really great...but I don't know if you're actually any good unless I hear you sing something I know."
I have persisted, all the same...pushing my likable, unknown music uphill. My working premise has been: If I show you something you don't already know, and you come to like it...well, then you come out liking & knowing more than you did before I got here. A win-win, right?
I suppose we shall see, by and by.
In hindsight, the music—the work onstage, the songs, making Through the Fire—these things formed a fulcrum. The lever that actually moved me through the "fire" was having a modicum of connection to other hearts & souls.
All along there remained a vital core of folks who were within reach during the tribulations. Even if it was just by way of a phone call a couple of times a year, or a text message every so often, these were the people who kept in touch enough to keep me from completely forgetting who I was. They're named on the back of the album cover.
Then, of course, there's Lee. The album is dedicated to my wife...a deeply gifted shamanic/sound healer, a tenderly rambunctious, tree-hugging, nurturing, melodic smart-ass of the best sort. She'd seen me play at a rural community festival in 2017, then started showing up regularly at my shows whenever I'd play in the region.
Lee can be very introverted, at times. A pivotal case in point: I prefer to have a bright spotlight on my face onstage, as an anchor. So, she would repeatedly remain at the back of the room, tucked behind the glare of the spotlight I was facing.
However...I could always see the light in her eyes shining easier than I could see the spotlight shining into my eyes. So after a few such episodes, I walked offstage into the audience and handed her the lyrics to a new song, "Through the Fire", and went back up and sang the song onstage for the first time:
And calling out, "¿A qué sabe la luna?"
Full-on and full-grown
Well underway. Much more to say
Your luminous eyes to have shone
We subsequently had several months of written correspondence—she had signed my mailing list at a show...something unprecedented for her. For months, we exchanged no phone numbers, and had only a few visits. We just wrote to each other. To say I was gunshy would be like calling the surface of the Sun "toasty".
Things grew slowly and steadily. Fast forward: We got married at the courthouse in March 2021...and then with her family & best friends in attendance in December 2022 for a backyard, hippie, tie-dye, candles & fairy-light festooned ceremony/Indian food feast.
The home stretch toward completing Through the Fire came at a tipping point/gut check/hurdle in June 2021, when I was hit with severe, acute appendicitis. The chief of surgery had to be called in mid-procedure when the resident saw the damage and wasn't sure whether to gut me or stay on track with the laparoscopy.
While I convalesced—prohibited from lifting over 3 pounds—Lee packed up all our stuff for a shipping container to be loaded onto a train and taken 800 miles across the desert and then some, to the other side of the country. During the last load-out of our stuff, she got me good with a piece of packing tape. I walked around for an hour, none the wiser.
After that, my circumstances took a dramatic turn for the better—leaving Western Australia and moving to Melbourne, into the welcoming arms of the city's final extended pandemic lockdown. I worked uninterrupted on the mixes until I knew I'd made the record as good as I was able...in that serene space we all glimpsed between manic comfort and disquiet outrage.
The main reference I used for the sound of Through the Fire was Al Schmitt's mixing/producer work on Jackson Browne's 1974 record, Late for the Sky. As a result, my album is without much of the highly compressed, in-your-face bite & sheen of today's Spotify fare. Between us, that has cost me a bit in terms of playlist placement here & there—where a curator thinks that the songs are great, while the record sounds off to them in some way that they can't quite put their finger on.
I'm inclined to think of it this way: Perhaps what the album lacks most is impatience—whereas the breathing room of earnest contemplativeness is almost certainly seen as frumpish. I'd even say willful exposure to such spaciousness has ebbed to the point of near disappearance from the public sphere.
But that's right about when things can start coming back, isn't it?
The final mix was completed on Christmas Eve 2021, as a gift to Lee...and as a reward to myself. Once The Plague subsided at the top of '22, I hit the road...on tour for a solid year in, around, and beyond Melbourne. By the end of that year, I could at least pretend that I could afford to get the project mastered. I couldn't afford not to, more like it. Earle Holder at HDQRTZ Mastering in Atlanta finished the masters on December 15, 2022.
By the time Through the Fire was released on CD & Bandcamp—on my birthday this year—seven years had passed from the time I'd written & recorded the initial tracks for "A Sign of Love". "Sign..." was the first song I had written upon arrival in Australia—and my working prototype for the instrumentation, sounds, and arrangement "recipe" I used throughout the album. Every production cycle, every remix-it-from-scratch iteration, even the final signoff on the masters...they all started with "A Sign of Love".
And now the record's out there...and the signs of love have been popping up every day since the release—from London to Pennsylvania, from Atlanta to Mexico City. And so begins a whole new chapter for me. At long last, I have a rekindled sense of possibility that runs counter to that dogged, methodical descent into obscure proficiency that had gripped me for those years before I got to Melbourne.
Why/how comes the shift?
Simple: Other people. People who cared. It was the end of Isolation. When I released the album, it brought me back into connection with so many people...people who remembered me despite my disappearing act, who voluntarily & actively know me, share history with me, and even overtly appreciate and make substantial personal use of what I create. They came out in droves.
If you suspect I'm talking about you right about now...yeah, I'm talking about you. Thank you. Even though most, but not all of you live 12,000 to 15,000 miles from where I sit writing this, you have come remarkably close.
You have gotten in my face...about the songs I'm actually singing. You have felt the love, y'all...and you have made every second of the 7-year journey meaningful & redeemable for me, by your choice to receive and embrace and feel into—and again, make use of—my humble offering of 11 songs that saved me.
Mind you, I don't plan on taking very long to make the next record...in comparison to this record, anyway. For me, now is a time of reconnection, re-cognition, reignition...a time of return...and returns, expansion, belief in possibility, and liberation. I feel welcomed home.
I'm here to offer what I can to inspire people to see and celebrate the best within themselves so that they know they belong to something big and sacred.
...because, people, that's what you have given to me.
I love y'all.
P.S.
Plans are in the early stages for a US tour next year. It's going to take some financial magic to pull it off, but it's got to happen. Stay tuned.
Kind words for Through the Fire...
"...'Through The Fire' is his redemptive tale...showcases Mosley's ability to convey a great deal of soul within a song...the whole album is quite terrific."
—Paul Kerr, AMERICANA UK
"...captures...catharsis in all its heartfelt authenticity, channeling the likes of Uncle Tupelo and Will Johnson in its earthy, often stark lyricism, and building towards...searing conviction."
—Jon Doyle, VARIOUS SMALL FLAMES
"Sensational! ...the entire record deserves your attention...a masterpiece..."
—Jeremy Bregman, MESMERIZED
Some playlists currently featuring songs from Through the Fire...
New Americana Music You May Never Have Heard - Americana Highways
Resources for addressing narcissistic relationship abuse...