In September bluegrass legend and dobro master Jerry Douglas released The Set, his first album in nearly a decade. The collection showcased six revamped songs alongside five brand-new tracks. Among the new compositions was “The Fifth Season.” Douglas will release the studio performance video for the 10-plus-minute instrumental tune tomorrow (December 18). American Songwriter is proud to exclusively premiere the clip today. Watch it below.
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Ahead of the release of “The Fifth Season” video, Douglas sat down with American Songwriter to discuss the song, its origin, and how it came together.
[RELATED: Hard Travelin’: A Q&A With Jerry Douglas]
Jerry Douglas on Creating “The Fifth Season”
“The Fifth Season” started its life as a commissioned piece. Before long, though, it took on a life of its own.
“I got commissioned to write a concerto for a festival called FreshGrass. It’s up in the Berkshires. It’s a beautiful festival set on the grounds of an old ceramic tube factory that actually was used during the Manhattan Project to create ceramic pieces that went into atomic bombs,” Jerry Douglas said.
“They commissioned me to write this piece and I started working on it and it wasn’t weird enough,” he recalled. “So, I called Mike Seal and he came over and it got plenty weird,” he added. “I had little pieces of all of the parts done and he came over and we put it all together and came up with some more stuff to put in there. Then, we got to the studio and played it a few times and arranged it a little differently than I took it in there,” he explained.
“It was a lot longer before I started hacking on it. I took out some things that were just redundant. It takes a while to shape something like that,” Douglas said of the finished product. “Then, we just kind of set it aside for about two years. When we finally brought it out and played it again, we were like, ‘Hey! This is good,’” he recalled.
Douglas said it took him and his bandmates around 20 hours total to write and arrange the track.
How “The Fifth Season” Fits Together
Jerry Douglas likened “The Fifth Season” to a puzzle. “Having a whole lot of pieces, it’s like a puzzle. You have to take some things out, rearrange it, and plug them back in. It’s just like a big ol’ puzzle. I think we got all the pieces in order but it took a while to give it real character,” he explained.
The studio video for “The Fifth Season” goes live tomorrow. Watch it a day early above.
Featured Image by Scott Simontacchi)
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