Brian had fallen in love with the Rocky Mountains while living in Colorado, but he didn’t want the hustle and bustle, so he confined his search for a new home to the northwestern states east of the Cascades and west of the Rockies. They started checking out small towns in Idaho, then Oregon, Washington, and Montana, until, frustrated, Brian turned the wheel over to his wife, who landed them in the quaint little mining town of Challis, Idaho.
Having spent the majority of his life in the big city, Challis seemed a bit desolate to Brian at first. With only 800 residents in the incorporated part of town, it was small and seemed lost in time, with many of the townspeople still acting as if it were 70s. But there was plenty of land for sale, and Brian saw the potential to build his dream home. And when they went uptown, they were greeted by friendly, like-minded folks. Simple, pragmatic, and friendly to boot. Check!
With new digs and finally on the mend, Brian began taking on new work, performing part-time with local bands, and figuring out what he wanted to do next. Brian had been working on jingles and movie soundtracks the entire time, but now wanted to prove the naysayers wrong and produce an album of songs that he wanted to do, playing every instrument and twisting every knob himself.
He started working on the Still Got My Mojo project, dusting off old recordings dating back to 1986, digitizing them, and then re-recording or cleaning up the original parts. Then he did something unique. For years, he was frustrated by the industry’s practice of overcompressing audio for streaming platforms. So he spent months developing and eventually patenting an engineering technique that gives a recording the warm, rich dynamics of vinyl, along with the normalization and dynamic width of a made-for-streaming recording.
Another unique aspect of the Still Got My Mojo project was its release schedule. Sony wasn’t all that interested in a cover album, so the project became the first release for Brian’s newly founded label, Musty Dungeon Studios, which released the album in four parts, including the EPs Live, Rock, and Soul, and the full-length album Deluxe, which contained all the EP recordings and a couple of previously released originals.
Nobody, not even Brian, could have predicted that the album would be so resoundingly popular. Within weeks of the first release, streaming numbers shot past half a million, surpassing the debut popularity of the Made in the Shade album by leaps and bounds in just a few months. Pretty soon, the album went Gold and landed on Billboard’s Independent Albums charts. He had not only found a new audience but also extended his reach worldwide.
The Still Got My Mojo project was the first to be released under Brian’s newly formed label, Musty Dungeon Studios, and was as unique in its development as in its release schedule, featuring the first use of Brian’s patented engineering technique.
Brian included “What the Hell” on the “Still Got My Mojo” album as an experiment to gauge whether the world still had an appetite for new original songs in the blues-rock genre. Surpassing “Shaky Ground”, “What the Hell” was the album’s most popular song, so Brian thought it a good idea to follow up with an album of originals. It would be his first solo album since 1993.
As he often did, Brian dug into his treasure chest of previously recorded music for inspiration. He dug out the jewels, recomposed them, added lyrics, and polished them off with vocals. Some of the songs on the album had already been released as singles, such as “I Love My Truck,” “Black Widow,” and “Watch That Girl Go,” and had been highly successful in their own right. But now they would benefit from Brian’s new engineering technique.
And this time, Sony was on board after learning their lesson from the success of the “Still Got My Mojo” album. Brian wasn’t about to sign over label rights to Sony, but he did let them handle distribution, which put Brian’s music in front of a much larger audience. Like “Still Got My Mojo,” the 2015 release of the “What the Hell” album quickly shot past half a million streams, and the album ended up on Billboard’s Independent Albums charts as well. But then something different happened.
Sony’s expanded distribution put Brian’s music in the faces of Hollywood movie executives. Suddenly, his music was being used in movie and television soundtracks, at times surpassing the revenue he earned from streaming. He was also receiving calls from other studios interested in licensing his engineering technique, especially from his longtime stomping grounds, Capitol Records. Brian had resigned himself to being a has-been when he moved to Challis, but as was so often the case in his career, somebody found him hiding under a rock and dragged him out from under it…
Brian had learned from his time with Cracker-41 that long extended tours was something his health couldn’t keep up with anymore, and he retired from touring when he moved to Challis. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in demand. Whenever Lyle Lovett went somewhere with his Big Band, Brian was his first choice to come tickle the keys. When old friend Chris Wall felt lonely on stage, he would call Brian to help liven up the show. He made a couple more cameos at the Crossroads Music Festival with his old friends Albert Lee and Vince Gill, and sat in with bands at the Austin City Limits Music Festival a few times. Mostly Brian just pulls out his acoustic and yodels one up for the locals or jams with the local garage bands.