Lead singer Rena Hopkins had moved to Detroit, and bassist Gary Weimer had moved to Columbus a couple years prior. Drummer Jim Lipscomb called co-founder Kent Meloy about that time to help him run a benefit concert in Cincinnati for Katrina relief – which turned into a literal case of ‘Hey man, let’s get the BAND back together!”. Over the course of about a month and a half, they gathered in a tiny AC-less rehearsal room at the height of the summer heat and re-learned an eight-song set, which not only went over better than any of them expected, but it sparked an idea.

A few years before, the band had recorded five songs at the now defunct Sound Images, but dissolved before anything could be done with them. Kent suggested they plan a single weekend at his home and record as much of the eight-song set as possible, use whatever they could get, combine it with the other five tunes and release it. Everyone was completely on-board, and did just that.

Over the course of two solid days they tracked tunes – drum kit in the living room, guitar amp in a bedroom at the end of a hallway with cables draped between exterior windows to keep the inside doors shut, Gary’s amp in the bathroom and Rena singing in the control room. It worked. Mostly.

Limitations of gear and knowledge led to a much longer mix process than Kent had hoped, but that was more due to lack of experience and a couple mistakes made while micing and tracking the drums. Still, it came out pretty good and they released the album as a swan song and went their separate ways.

Fast forward about four years. Rena and Gary were enjoying life in their new homes, Kent had taken a job at the University of Cincinnati. Jim called Kent and expressed a deep need to get another band going, coercing him (not really very hard to do) to begin figuring out what that would look like.

Joining forces with Cincinnati music veteran Mark Szabo they began to plot out this next monster. Unfortunately, in March of 2016 Jim passed away unexpectedly, devastating the rest of his bandmates, family and friends. That, it seemed, was the end of that.

In 2019, Kent was working with Oh So Luminous – in essence the band that he, Jim and Mark had started those three years prior – recording their debut album while working on a solo piece when he realized that due to some new tools acquired and tons of knowledge gained from folks that know what they’re doing, there was a chance that “Dead Band Walking” could be remixed, and the errors in drum recording could be fixed. He set to work, and after knocking out a rough of “Kerosene” he realized this wasn’t just maybe possible, it was completely doable. So – for the next month Jim’s drums were slowly reborn, given the thunder they always deserved, along with a general smoothing and tightening of everything else.

So, what better way to celebrate than to re-release an album by a band that didn’t exist when it was originally released than by putting it out there on the first of January, 2020 – a year of hindsight and memory. It seemed like the thing to do.

So they did.