Sometime in the early 2010s, Portland musician Dave Depper decided he wanted to record a note-for-note cover of Paul McCartney’s second post-Beatles album, Ram, all by himself.
So he bought gear, holed up in his home, and spent a month doing exactly that. It was a “personal experiment that went haywire,” Depper says now—his own private crash course in recording techniques. But local label Jackpot Records got wind of the project, and released his version, The Ram Project, in 2011. Which was great, but afterward, Depper found himself in essentially the same position as when he started.
“I toured a bit and worked at my day job, and I was sitting on my hands with the equipment I’d used to do Ram, but I had no material,” he says. “I was like, ‘I can’t believe this. I still can’t write songs.’ I just really felt frustrated at my inability to come across anything that sounded authentically like myself.”