Lake Fever Sessions

Join our mailing list to be notified the moment our new sessions go live. We also plan on offering a few additional goodies further on down the line and you'll be the first to know about them. There's no downside here, only personal benefit.

Get Updates:

The heart and soul of these performances lies with the artists themselves but their introduction to the outside world is brought to you by...

Lake Fever Productions

Located on Music Row, Lake Fever Productions is an artist catered studio that houses and records the audio for each session. They'd love to record your album too.

Tugboat Productions

Tugboat Productions is a video production company run by ne'er-do-well musicians. Tugboat shoots and edits each Lake Fever Session, as well as other fine projects all over the Southeast.

The Story of Lake Fever Sessions

Dear Friends, Welcome to Lake Fever Sessions. The formula behind what we're doing is really rather simple:

Invite some of our favorite artists into the studio for the better part of an afternoon and have them perform a few numbers.
Document their performance with HD video and multitrack audio.
Edit. Mix. Master. Upload.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Right. Simple enough. So who is this "we?"

Obvious by that URL up at the top of your browser, part of this team involves the Lake Fever crew: Jason Bullock, John Baldwin, and yours truly. In short, Lake Fever is a recording studio on Music Row. Despite being surrounded by the corporate country music machine, we choose to spend our time working with forward-thinking artists who we believe just may hold a stake in the future of music. This is how we've played it going on six years now. We're no mavericks, mind you... just stubborn and easily bored by bad music.

For the past couple years, we've been slowly growing this idea of producing a long-term audio/visual series. There were a few attempts to realize this vision all on our own, but our efforts were fruitless. Just because the technology is available to dabble in new creative mediums, we learned that such is best left to the professionals. It became obvious that the only way for such an endeavor to work is for Lake Fever to focus on what we do best - making records - and to find a counterpart of like mindset and skill to man the visuals.

Enter Tugboat Productions, an underdog video production company with the brain of a musician. Dedicated to playing, consuming, and creatively documenting live music, Andy Snyder & Josh Lagersen were the perfect match for Lake Fever. Much like our own chosen route, Tugboat established a solid reputation by working with many Nashville-based bands on a myriad of projects. 2008 proved to be a break-out year for the company as their list of credits grew to add several artists that have reached that much-coveted level of critical acclaim and widespread recognition... eerily similar to the banner year of '08 we experienced in the studio. It almost seems our paths were destined to cross. And couldn't have come at a better time.

And, then, of course, somebody has to make it all work on the interwebs, and make it clean and shiny for all the world to see. That would be Mr. Eades of yewknee.com, the one who speaks in ones and zeroes. But he also speaks in kick-ass web design and making the whole thing run smoothly and generally sealing it all up nice and tight. He's a self-described "man with his hand in many pies," including acting as "curator" for We Own This Town. He's a smart guy who agreed to make us look legit, and we're mighty glad he's on our side.

And one other thing: not one of us is making a dime doing this.

"Well then, why?" you ask.

Let's start with this city and its loud creative hum. Sure, there's a really loud part-- the machine part of it, the hit-making formula part, the part that has earned Nashville a certain musical reputation as a city. But just under that, there's a lot of independent, free-wheelin' genius flying around, mad skillz if you will, people doing incredible things that no one has ever done before, or reinterpreting what you know in a way that blows your mind. But it seemed fragmented to us, every bright idea plowing ahead in its own direction, making its way around one scene or another and back again. We dreamed up this project as a way to join forces-- that's musicians, sound engineers, video producers and internet masterminds-- to clear an even bigger path towards creating something meaningful, for ourselves and for our beloved music scene.

And what's more powerful than listening to awesome rock n' roll made by brilliant people? Seeing and hearing it. Connecting with it twice. Knowing where it comes from and how it gets to you. No disposable pop chart-toppers here, folks. We're here to get intimate.

Thanks for coming to Lake Fever Sessions. You're going to like what we've done, and there's more where that came from.

Hold onto your hats,
Joe Baine Colvert

2024 Archive Update

The Lake Fever Sessions were active from January 2009 to May 2010; just 17 months. Shorter than the lifespan of most bands, in fact! The pace of new sessions slowed over time, the blog stopped posting updates and it faded from view. A blip of an update came in Oct 2010 with one final session from Destry but that was it. By 2013, the domain expired and went through a series of domain squatters holding on to the URL simply because it had existed at one time. Currently, in 2024, the original lakefeversessions.com domain seems to be a French escort service; I don't recommend visiting.

That paints a grim picture but the truth is that Lake Fever Sessions were always a passion project. Joe Baine Colvert, John Baldwin and Jason Bullock ran the Lake Fever Productions recording studio and leveraged the sessions to raise their profile as a destination that was not your run-of-the-mill Music Row recording studio. It worked. Andy Snyder and Josh Lagerson from Tugboat Productions had similar goals of using the sessions as a calling card to showcase the kind of work they could capture; energetic and lively performances, even in a confined space. You only have to watch one session for all the evidence you need to see that they accomplished exactly that.

However, the primary drive was simply to capture something worthwhile that was happening at the time. Nashville is always at odds between its residents and how its perceived. So much so that it's become a cliche. "Nashville is so much more than country music" is a phrase that's uttered with great frequency in response to the explosion of downtown honky tonks, drunken transpotainment, redneck warriors and bad politicians. Of course, it is also all of those terrible things but it is more than that. The cliche is true.

Over the course of twenty-five sessions, Lake Fever Sessions captured a snapshop of the local scene, some regional favorites and a handful of impressive national touring acts. It's not holistic by any means but it's impressive. How they managed to get St. Vincent, Travis or Cursive is a mystery but clearly a testament to the quality of the recordings and the persistence of those involved. I have my favorites but there isn't a bad one in the bunch.

Bringing the website back from the Internet grave wasn't a necessary undertaking. All of the recordings still live on Vimeo and many are on YouTube as well. They have been for years. But neither of those destinations present the whole package. Many of the bands would supply writeups for each song, photographers would capture moments that weren't in the videos and each session came with a dose of Joe Baine Colvert insights. In short, you could still see the sessions but they deserved better.

So, I present to you the Lake Fever Sessions Archive. A new domain but the same great content. The original site was powered by a database that hasn't been accessible for at least eleven years and no one had a backup. Fortunately, the Internet archive had plenty of insights to draw from and a deeply nested Dropbox folder had all my original files. Some of this new site has been updated to work a bit better with modern technology but I did my best to preserve everything as closely as I could.

There are plenty of other Nashvilled-based performance sessions out there - Live at Josh’s House, Monkey Riot Q Sessions, Found Sounds, On Tape, House Show and taped come to mind as additional worthwhile destinations - but the concept of Lake Fever Sessions isn't what made it special, it's the content. This era of Nashville is becoming the old guard looking back fondly on these times. But it's not purely nostalgia that makes these recordings enjoyable, they are legitimately great performances even if you're just discovering them for the first time.

I hope you enjoy them now as much as we did then.

-Michael Eades