By: Zoe Bernardi, Community Editor
Micheal Spaulding, also known as the musician Frankie Moon recently released his third album with his band the Dave Mathewses Band. Their album, “The Dark Side of Frankie Moon,” is unlike any of his previous work. It was professional created, mixed and mastered. Spaulding held a release party at Sun Tiki studios in Portland the day after the album released, on September 28, 2019.
Spaulding is a theater major at USM with a concentration in technical and design. He is currently finishing up his last semester and hopes to graduate in May.
Frankie Moon and Dave Mathewses Band are made up of four people: a singer, drums, bass and guitar. Spaulding is the singer. Todd Casper is on drums. Casper and Spaulding met through the guitar player Stanley Beck when Spaulding worked with Casper’s and Beck’s band “Adulting.” The bassist and harmony is Dominic Fazio, who is a hometown friend of Spaulding from Madison, ME.
The band has been playing at Sun Tiki studios since it opened over 2 years ago. Spaulding is good friends with the owner and wanted to have the release party there. He liked how intimate the stage was to the audience.
“I couldn’t see myself playing anywhere else where I was further away from the people,” he said.
The band released the album the day before the party. “I wanted to have people hear the music before the show,” Spaulding said.
When explaining the writing process for the album, Spaulding said that it took 5 years to write and finish this album. Track 15 (out of 17 songs) was written during his senior year of high school. This album is also Spaulding first that he has done all by himself and produced at a professional recording studio. The first two albums were made without help in previous years. His first album is called “College Debt,” this can be found on Bandcamp exclusively and has 11 songs. The second is called “Songs about Space” and can be found everywhere online, and was made a year after “College Debt.”
This album was recorded in Acadia recording in Portland with help from Todd Hutchison and was also mixed and mastered. Spaulding explained that when music is mixed it means that each song has fixed volumes and all parts of the song, all of the lyrics and instruments are even in volume and sound uniform. This is needed because naturally, the bass is louder than the vocals. When it comes to mastering, Spaulding said fine-tuning an album after mixing it is “the icing on the cake.”
This entire process of recording took 3 months. It took 6 months to perfect all lyrics and instruments, then five days in the studio. Mixing took two days and mastering was a couple more. The album has a total of 17 songs.
Originally, he wanted 23 songs and for it to be a mix of both electric and acoustic songs. Spaulding “wanted it to be like a big storybook.” Spaulding said that the whole process wasn’t difficult and that Hutchison was good at making the music sound as good as it could be, “have a team that wants to make a good album and it just sort of happened”
The majority of the songs on the album are created by Spaulding. “I play how I feel, I am always thinking about lyrics and chords and playing guitar,” he said.
He prefers to make music alone, finding chords that resonated with him and try to work around it and finding other pieces.
The release party was a way to connect the band with fellow friends, family and other local artists. Sun Tiki was an intimate place to do so. Over 50 people were in attendance bonding over the newest Frankie Moon and the Dave Matthews Band album, “The Dark side of Frankie Moon.”