Daniel Champagne - The Heartland Hurricanes

I've always wanted to make an album that's completely solo. Just me and my guitar, in a room playing all the songs live because that's what I've done my whole life and it's what I do on stage every night. I don't know why but music has always been a very personal thing for me. Something I feel most comfortable doing on my own. 2015 was a big year for me, even busier than usual. I played over two hundred shows around the world and at the end of it all just decided to come straight off the road and into the studio to throw down everything that felt like it needed to come out at the time. So after so many years of performing night after night and throwing myself around the globe like a corkscrew I suddenly found myself back where I began - on the Far South Coast of NSW in Australia, half an hour from the house I grew up in, recording in the same studio I first walked into as an 18 year old to make my first EP with one of my best friends sitting in the control room to help me try and capture this whole thing. I spent three summer nights laying down as much music as I could. Some songs took one take and some took about thirty. It was all live. It was all real. And you have no choice but to be completely honest when playing it this way. Whatever happens belongs to that one moment. You can't see it coming and you can't do anything about it once it's gone so when the the song is over, you listen back to what happened and either live with that take or go back to the top and try it all again. We managed to capture some new songs that were born out of the past few years of touring and some older ones from previous albums that have grown up a lot on the road and I felt I could do more justice to today. I also finally recorded my own versions of 'Spoonful' (Willie Dixon), 'Vincent' (Don McLean) and 'Fade To Black' (Mark Knopfler), which have been in the live show for years now but wouldn't fit any of my other albums.