When local clubs and restaurants shut down in 2020 due to the pandemic, local singer-songwriter Ray Flanagan knew he had to do something to keep his sanity and bring in some income. He started writing two songs a month and learned to record himself for the very first time. The experience taught him an important lesson —he could, in fact, become his own producer.
“Prior to that, I was against recording my own music,” he says one morning from Five Points, one of his favorite local coffee shops. His bushy hair and beard and gray wool sweater give him a professorial vibe as he talks about his pandemic experience and how he spent all of last year learning the first Bach cello suite on tenor banjo. “I know real engineers and producers. That’s what they specialize in. It was all about quality control. It’s great that everyone thinks they can be a producer. But when Covid happened, my whole life was in bars and restaurants, and they were closing. I just thought, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Those sessions gave him “practice” for his forthcoming album, My Mind Is Burning Up, which he wrote and recorded over a two-month time period with a little help from local singer-songwriter Josee McGee, whom he met at an open mic night.
“She’s amazing. Last year, she put this great record called Weeper,” says Flanagan when asked about McGee. “We have a lot of mutual friends. I do a monthly show at the Winchester, which is the last Monday of every month. We have monthly guests, and she was our guest last May, and we just hit it off. I hate recording and performing at the same time. You have to make sure the levels are right, and to get into a flow is difficult if you’re worried about three different things. I brought up the idea [that she could help me record the album], and she told me she could help out if I needed someone to press record. It ended up being cool even though with me, it might be two in the morning, and I would decide to record.”
Flanagan says the death of singer-songwriter Brian Wilson informed many of the songs, which vary from raucous roots rock numbers (“Ashes”) to Velvet Underground-like distorted guitar ballads (“The Camel’s Back”).
Flanagan’s first-ever release on vinyl, the album arrives on April 3. A release party takes place on April 24 at Dunlap’s Corner Bar.
The album captures a moment, and Flanagan even recorded the release’s ten songs in the order in which they appear on the record.
“To me, it’s an overarching rock ’n’ roll thing,” he says of the album’s influences. “[My Mind] is influenced by everything from Rolling Stones to Mississippi John Hurt to Neil Young to Randy Rhoads and Judas Priest. I grew up listening to a lot of Bruce Springsteen, so there’s an element of that. I also love Yes and Genesis. And there’s early rock ‘n’ roll like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.”
Flanagan has manifested his vision of himself as a working musician. As a kid, he carried around a plastic guitar and sang.
“I was writing songs before I played music,” he says. “I think in fifth grade, I was writing songs. I told my first grade teacher that I wanted to be Bruce Springsteen. My dad loves Bruce. He always had Darkness on the Edge of Town in his car.”
Flanagan says that as the music industry turns to AI to deliver polished pop and rock hits, he’s veered toward making music that captures a raw moment.
“I purposely want to make things that sound crude,” he says.
He says the Cleveland community funded My Mind Is Burning Up, which locally based Gotta Groove Records will press.
“I have a strong community centered around my Winchester shows,” he says. “And every Tuesday, I host a jam at the Mercury Music Lounge. It’s been remarkably consistent. Musicians having outlets seems to be really valuable with the stress of everything right now. The Winchester is where I’m growing a community. My tagline is ‘the true social function of music is community.’ In America, we unfortunately have a very producer-and-consumer relationship with music.”
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