“Madison,” an album recorded in Lost World Caverns, dropped on Friday, Nov. 5.
Steve Silverberg, owner of the Lost World Caverns, excitedly waited on Wednesday, Nov. 3, for the album’s release when he spoke with The West Virginia Daily News.
“The big deal is this girl, Haley Dahl or Sloppy Jane as she’s known,” said Silverberg. “She wrote, conducted, produced, sang, and played an [an album here]. We had a full orchestra in the cave, with singing. The entire album is being released Friday, Nov. 5.”
“Madison,” the name of the album, was described as a “chamber pop” record in its trailer. The first two singles, titled “Party Anthem” and “Jesus and Your Living Room” were released earlier this year, and are able to compete with the best of modern indie music. The echoes of the Lost World Cavern leave each with a haunting background alongside of heartbeat drums, vocals, and choral accompaniment.
Sloppy Jane and “Madison” were both featured in the “New York Times” on Nov. 2 in a piece titled “To Go Big, Sloppy Jane Went Underground.” The article also featured Lewisburg and Lost World Caverns.
“She had found some recordings of the guy that wrote music for [The Great Stalacpipe Organ] in Luray Caverns,” Silverberg explained. “She just heard this haunting kind of sound that came from recording in the cave and had to do something that nobody else had done before. [She decided] to write music and produce this thing in a cave.”
According to the Times, the project was not through a record label, though it was eventually picked up by Saddest Factory Records and was funded through credit cards, a GoFundMe campaign and the kindness of others, including Silverberg allowing the use of Lost World for free as long as needed.
“We’d start setting up and [recording] from five every afternoon and they would be here until 4:30 in the morning,” explained Silverberg to The West Virginia Daily News. “[It was a] 12-hour day at night, around my normal hours of being open. … Then they got done here and went back to New York to go into post-production and COVID hit. They were down for almost two years, unable to finish this.”
According to the album announcement trailer, “the preparation for the making of this record took three years. We traveled across the United States conducting demo sessions in various caves with various instrumentation to find the perfect location to record, sometimes living in an unheated van for weeks at a time. In our final session, we recorded 21 musicians 120 feet underground. We recorded from 3 p.m. until 8 in the morning every day, in freezing temperature and 98 percent humidity.”
The two entrances to Lost World, one grated directly above one of the structures in the cave, and the main entrance connected to the entrance building, were both in use during production, something Silverberg remembered with a smile.
“There was one night we did just brass, one night that was just percussion, one night that was just strings. … We had a vehicle with the sound dude … parked up [above the original entrance to Lost World]. We ran a fiber optic cable and power [down the entrance, into the cave]. The mixing board was as big as the back of the SUV. We had so much fun.”
The original entrance to Lost World Caverns, where a fiber optic cable was run down to the musicians below. |
The album is expected to release on Spotify, Bandcamp and several other places music is available. The full trailer is available on Youtube titled “Sloppy Jane ‘Madison’ Trailer.”
“The whole time, since I met her, I thought she had the potential to be the next Lady Gaga,” Silverberg said. “She texted me last night ‘we at the New York Times!’ and they just did an article that came out this morning.”
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