Country music artist Jess Moskaluke released her new album The Demos on Friday, featuring polished up recorded songs that have never been released.
Moskaluke explained that typically her recording process involves writing a song specifically for an album.
“We create songs really carefully to make sure that they go together and each of those songs has a specific role on the album,” she said.
After taking a few days or weeks to work on the songs, Moskaluke heads into the studio to record them.
“Because of the pandemic, none of that was possible,” Moskaluke said. “What I ended up doing was diving into my catalogue and going through and picking some of those songs that I was still madly in love with that I never had the opportunity to release until now.”
The songs featured on The Demos were all recorded the day they were written. Some songs have been released on other albums such as Mapdot, Country Girls, and Halfway Home.
Moskaluke included those hit singles to show fans what a demo truly is.
“A demo is what you walk out of the room with that day. Sometimes it’s just a guitar vocal that’s recorded on an iPhone,” Moskaluke said.
Other times, artists may get into the studio and record what Moskaluke describes as “a half-finished version of a song.”
Moskaluke wants fans to get a peek at what the songwriting process looks like for her with this album.
“(The songs are) rough versions, so you’ll hear all my vocal impurities and all of the changes that we made,” she said.
By releasing the demos of songs already recorded such as Mapdot, Moskaluke thought it would be fun for fans to hear what a song sounds like before going through a full recording process.
Moskaluke told Focus Saskatchewan host Allison Bamford that it’s hard for her to pick a favourite song on the album, calling them her “song babies.”
One favourite so far is Leave Each Other Alone, a duet with Australian artist Travis Collins.
Mapdot is another song that has a special place in Moskaluke’s heart. The song is written about the small Saskatchewan towns, Langenburg and Rocanville, that Moskaluke grew up and has lived in.
Moskaluke performed her last concert before the pandemic in March 2020 with fellow country artists Gord Bamford at #REDNEK Festival in Moose Jaw.
Both Moskaluke’s and Bamford’s teams decided that would be the last stop on their tour while they waited out the pandemic.
“We both kind of thought well you know what we’ll be at home for a couple weeks, a month, maybe two max and then we’ll rebook this whole tour and we’ll get back out and no problem,” Moskaluke said.
Moskaluke got the chance to play at Krugo Fest in August that saw fans socially distanced and in their own bubbles.
“What I loved about that concert is that it didn’t feel like we were doing it because of the pandemic, it felt like something we were able to do in spite of it,” she said.
Moskaluke has tried writing during the pandemic but said it’s challenging doing so over Zoom, saying it lacks the emotional aspect of songwriting that she’s used to.
She explained that releasing this album was a very different experience for her.
The Demos is available on Apple Music and Spotify.
-with files from Allison Bamford
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