I’ve had both the Arlis! single on Titan Records and the RCA Peach and Lee 45 in my record collection for a long time and am a big fan of both records. I wasn’t aware that  there were any other recordings from Peach and Lee until a friend of mine showed me a Youtube link that had posted sometime earlier. Even though the quality of the recordings on the Youtube video was pretty rough I could tell that the songs were really amazing and wanted to see if I could get in touch with Arlis or Larry to learn more about  the group.

I first made contact with Larry Lee by cold calling him and leaving a message on his voicemail. He called me back the next day kind of surprised, and let me know that he had lots of reel to reel tapes in storage and that he would reach out to Arlis and see if he was interested in working on the record.  Sure enough a few days later he sent me a photo of a big box of reel to reel tapes, told me he had gotten the thumbs up from Arlis and also put me in touch with Fred Bova and Larry Stolarski who had saved and digitized a bunch of Peach and Lee recordings.

After some back and forth Larry sent me the tapes and I started the process of going through all the tapes and organizing everything. There was A LOT of material to sort through and shortly after this I was working to get Larry’s tapes transferred and sent to Jessica Thompson for restoration while also going through Fred’s  tracks and making selections with Larry and Arlis. There were so many great songs to choose from that it was really difficult to narrow the track list down to 27 songs.

Once we finally settled on the tracks we moved on to mastering and getting the photos, liners and artwork together which took several months.  What we ended up with after almost a year of work is something that I think shows the brilliant work of two friends who had something really special and (lucky for us) had the foresight to record most of it.  I had a great time working on this and getting to know Larry and Arlis and am truly honored to be able to release this record! 

…Jeremy Thompson – Reminder Records