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Peter Reckell Releases New Musical Project

Peter Reckell (ex-Bo, DAYS), in collaboration with an international coterie of musicians, including his wife, Kelly Moneymaker, is one of the artists featured on a brand-new Christmas LP, Joy, available now at www.blueaeris.com. The project “just sort of came about,” says Reckell, who now lives in New Zealand. “You know, we sit around with people and obviously we meet up with a lot of musicians [and my friend Nick Granville ] has a studio, [we’re putting one together in the back of my house] and this idea of putting together a Christmas album came about sort of — I hate that word, but organically, and we just did it! And I got to sing again, which I was actually a little nervous about at first because it had been a while, but I kind of liked it! It was fun.” He also directed several music videos for the album, which will be released soon. “We’ve got these two young bands that are just incredible; one plays like ’80s style rock music, so of course I love them and I got to direct their video, and another was just a couple musicians, young, 20-year-old musicians that sort of fell into the whole picture.” He plans to do more directing in the future, and says with a chuckle, “I’m sure a few of the directors that have had to work with me will go, ‘Yeah, I can see that!’ Sometimes I had a tendency to take over. But it’s fun to see from the other side of the camera and really look at things and what the audience is going to see and get involved with the lights and the sound and the set dressing, everything that directors have to think about. Being in front of the camera, you’ve got one thing you’ve gotta do and it’s pretty easy, comparatively!”

On Joy, “There are 13 songs; 3 of them are covers and 10 are originals,” Reckell reports. “The bands and pretty much anybody who was doing the singing either wrote the song or wrote half of it; they were involved in the writing somehow. ELK plays “Old School Rock.” The LP came together “in an incredibly short time,” he marvels. “I think it’s been six weeks that we put it together, and it wasn’t that difficult because, like I said, Nick had the studio — ‘Hey, these guys can come in and do this,’ and we’ve got some of the most amazing singers here. It was a communal thing here in New Zealand. There’s so much time just to sit and play and have fun. The whole idea came about because of Covid and everybody is just coming up [with new artistic endeavors to put out] and we were like, well, ‘Why don’t we do that for Christmas?’ It was fun to have something to give to my audience,” he adds. “Over the years I’ve said, ‘I’ve got a project’ and it doesn’t come through … that’s happened a few times and it’s nice to finally have a project that is going to be out there and people can see it and hear it.” For more info, click here.

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