Roots Music Report

About the Band

mwe3.com presents a new interview with    http://www.mwe3.com/reviews/Cloutier2018/
MARK CLOUTIER

mwe3: Is the 2018 CD release of Thunder And Lightning the first album you’ve made with your brother Myke in the band Cloutier? You guys sound like you’ve been recording together for decades, will there be gigs promoting the album? Is that family and musical ESP between two brothers working together on the Thunder And Lightning CD?

Mark Cloutier: Yes this is our first release together and I owe it to brother Myke for instigating this project by simply saying let’s do some jamming and see what happens. He was coming to my house once a week and we started off playing acoustically and recording everything with my Edirol MP3 recorder. He also brought over his old boom box with a small mic attached for recording. I would play stuff and he would start singing melodies over the guitar music and bring the tape home and write words over what we had jammed on. It was a really neat process and Myke worked extremely hard and would come back and play the music for me that was taped previously so I could remember what I did. We just built upon that formula weekly and it produced some really cool material. I’m very proud of this album. I think the “ESP” really flourished when we actually recorded because there were some very spontaneous things that happened in studio that really helped create a great vibe!

mwe3: How did you make the Thunder And Lightning album? Was it cut live and did Myke supply all the lyrics and vocals on the CD? He’s a great lyricist. What was the nature of the collaboration on the Thunder 'N' Lightning album? Sounds like he has a lot of compelling ideas in his expressive vocals.

Mark Cloutier: To begin with it was just really Myke and myself playing together in my living room until we got in studio and decided to use studio musicians to make it easy as far as organization. I have had 35 years of experience playing blues and rock ‘n’ roll, so I was confident I could lead session players through these songs and basically teaching them arrangements and what we were looking for in each song. The great thing is everyone had some nice input in the process. Myke is absolutely a superb lyricist we just had to teach him about how to communicate and deal with song arrangements in a live studio environment. The main thing for us was to get a great backing track in a single take from the drummer, bass man, and myself. To me that was the hardest part of it all. The tracking was a blast. I loved plugging in and exchanging ideas with Andrew the producer. He was superb.

Discography

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Thunder 'n' Lightning Details Label: Self-Release Genres: Blues Styles: Blues Rock Songs on the Album Track # Song Title Style Genre 1 Flipping and Flapping Blues Rock Blues 2 Whispering Howling Wind Blues Rock Blues 3 Every Little Thing Blues Rock Blues 4 I Call Home Blues Rock Blues 5 Hard Luck Man Blues Rock Blues 6 Down Blues Rock Blues 7 Man on the Mountain Blues Rock Blues 8 Dreaming a Dream Blues Rock Blues 9 Green Eyed Foolish Man Blues Rock Blues 10 Thunder and Lightning Blues Rock Blues

Reviews

Thunder 'n' Lightning

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Album: Thunder 'n' Lightning
Label: Self-Release

Posted By: Robert Silverstein
Apr 18, 2019