“I had turned a corner I didn’t know was there, onto a street I didn’t know existed because of a blind man who lived right down the road,” says Burdett.

The spark that was lit by Watson that evening has led Burdett to all kinds of guitar players and traditional music he would not have sought out otherwise. He introduced Burdett to the music that had been all around him the whole time and that he’d just never noticed.

Most music producers request that artist record instrumental and vocal tracks separately to create the most pure recordings. Burdett has learned, over the course of four albums, that this process doesn’t work for him. His performance gets “washed out” this way. He prefers to play and sing in the same track, just as he would during a live performance, for a more organic recording.

For Burdett, “no song comes fully formed.” It begins as a spark of inspiration, then Burdett uses an app on his smartphone to capture those sparks and a program on his computer to develop those collected ideas into fully formed songs later, with guitar in hand.

Burdett and his band raised $9,000 from a Kickstarter campaign to record his fourth album, “Breathing Underwater.”

The song will be available in February on CD at Our State events and via digital download at ourstate.com and aaronburdett.com.

– article submitted by Brooke Csuka