This is officially my debut album, and the first studio project I’ve done under my own name in 18 years. During that long gap, I made several albums as a member of various bands: Fuller, the Grand Old Party, and Bedsit Poets. But the closest thing I had to a solo record—eight songs cut in two Boston studios—was completed in 1995, and hardly anyone heard it because I never bothered to release it. Almost immediately after the mixes were done, I moved from Boston to New York to become a magazine editor, and from that point on I never saw the sense in putting out an album as a solo artist.

Fast-forward more than a decade. When Bedsit Poets broke up in 2009, I already had a handful of relatively recent songs lying around that I liked but didn’t think were right for the band. Over the next few years, the stockpile slowly grew. My former Bedsits bandmate Amanda Thorpe provided an invaluable service by helping me finish three songs: "How Does It Feel to Be Free," "Make Sure You're Right," and "Will You Sail." I, in turn, fleshed out a basic melody and chord sequence she'd been kicking around for a while, and that became "Mysteries of the Deep South."

By the spring of 2013 I realized I had enough good tunes to make a proper album without having to delve into my huge archive of original music from the ’80s and ’90s. (I may very well raid that archive for future projects, but this time I wanted to focus on stuff that felt new to me.) Unlike a lot of stuff I'd written in the past, these new songs were all extremely personal and related directly to things that had happened in my life. I was pleased that they seemed to belong together.

In May 2013, I posted home demos of the songs on SoundCloud and invited people to comment. After taking those comments under consideration, I moved ahead with the process. First I selected the players. They included Amanda on backing vocals, my former Fuller colleagues Michael Gelfand on bass and Peter Catapano on drums, and two great musicians I'd played with in Boston during the early '90s: drummer Dave Richman and clarinetist Jeff Hudgins (who plays other wind instruments wonderfully too, just so you know). Next I picked the studio, and it couldn't have been a better fit. Tom Beaujour at Nuthouse Recording in Hoboken, NJ, knew exactly what I wanted pretty much instantly and delivered it perfectly.

It took three months to record and another three months to mix the 13 tracks on I Call Time. Another old friend, Wharton Tiers, handled the mastering; yet another, Robin Malik, took the photos and designed the package.

And so now it gives me great pride to present I Call Time, my first solo album (better late than never). —Mac Randall, 2014