Right after the Kickstarter, to keep the momentum going, Sullivan booked a night at Waterworks Studio, recording "Korah's Rebellion" and "El Terco Corazon."
"I could imagine the sound I wanted for Billy's music, and that night I got the rough sketch that we used for the rest of the album," Sullivan says.
Then came working out the rest of the songs.
"Billy had 30 or so songs that he wanted to try," Sullivan says. "Right away, the first thing we did was get together twice a week all December (2012) in my living room, just me and him with acoustic guitars, and pick one song a day to work on arrangements and trim them down. Most of his songs had seven or eight verses. They're brilliant words, but every song was packed to the brim and it was a lot of trimming to get songs that had more focus."
Sedlmayr takes a lot of his song lyrics from prose, good ideas or good lines from short stories he's written or other things in progress.
"I get an idea and I put the words to the story. Some of them are old. Some I worked on when I was inside, some right after I got out," he says. "'Tucson Kills' came to me in five minutes, but all of them weren't that way."
Sedlmayr "woodshedded" some songs with childhood friends and old bandmates like Seger, Van Christian and John Venet (The Pedestrians). Still, playing with Sullivan began to transform the songs.
"We had to carve them back a lot," Sedlmayr says. "I gave up a lot of my ideas about stuff and went with the flow. There are a lot of verses left hanging around, but you don't want every song to be 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' or something."
For recording, Sullivan brought the band in and taught them the songs on the fly, recording at most three takes.
"The music was performed really delicately, really quietly and for the most part was trying to bring out the imagery that was already there in Billy's lyrics, adding some sonic imagery that matched," he says. "It was always about keeping Billy on top, keeping the focus on his words and his voice and that concept went all the way through mixing. That really keeps it a solo record."
The sound blends folk and rock, a sort of Americana, resting on acoustic guitars (including 12-string and nylon-string), pedal steel and upright bass, with accents of trumpet, congas and accordion.
"I hadn't really done a super loud rock 'n' roll thing in a long time, since I was drumming. I couldn't imagine at my age doing that. It would be a little awkward. Rock 'n' roll is a young man's game. I get that. But this record has energy to it and it has soul to it," Sedlmayr says. "I believe in the record. I feel weird saying it's my solo record. A lot of people really, really helped. Gabe produced it and the musicians he chose worked out pretty perfectly."
Joining Sullivan in what they call the The Mother Higgins Children Band (named for the original juvenile detention center in Tucson) are Thøger T. Lund on bass, Jason Urman on keyboards and accordion, Connor Gallagher on guitar and pedal steel and Winston Watson on drums.
Another album's worth of songs were recorded and left off "Charmed Life." Sullivan and Sedlmayr experimented with three different song sequences, each with different groups of songs (one even left off "Tucson Kills"). All three created different moods and they went with what gelled together best.
"But with this sequence, more than a mood, when I listen to it, I see Billy. I feel Billy. Everything is tied together because of the songs we chose. It's a really important picture of who Billy is and what his character is," Sullivan says.
For his part, Sedlmayr says he's always wanted to get his songs down and let other people hear them, but it was Sullivan who gave him the confidence it could be done.
"When somebody says 'your record,' I think 'Yeah, right.' Had it just been me with an acoustic guitar and the tape running, it wouldn't have been the same. What we came up with was something really unique and different. I'm really proud of it and really proud of Gabe. I gave up control and it was fairly easy because playing with him is such a gas," Sedlmayr says. "My hope is things grow with it. I'm a hard learner and things are a lot better, but there's always a lot of room for improvement with me."
