'Rachael & Vilray' has been a musical act ever since Rachael saw me play a very short set of covers and said she wanted in. Her voice is singular, agile, beautiful, and, as I found when we started performing original music, the most rewarding instrument to write for. In the seven years since we began, our configuration has ranged from an intimate duo, to the 9-piece formation you hear on six of these tracks. No matter the set-up on stage, my friend Rachael and I sing right to each other, tell stories about how the songs came to be, and relate them to the many old love songs we love to love.

There's a lyric on this album that summarizes the qualifications of the musicians who made it: "we've all heard the legends." Each of us has keenly absorbed the work of a pantheon of jazz giants that inspires and informs this music. Just invoking the name of any one of these is efficient shorthand, positing an approach to a phrase or song. "Let's remember Louis Jordan," I said before the master take of "Why Do I?"" to encourage a jolt of the proto-rock'n'roll that was missing. Or when Rachael was considering how to clearly deliver a tricky line in "Hate is the Basis (of Love),"" I offered that I thought it was "a Betty Carter thing." Some names suggest a constellation of techniques, flourishes, and accents that illuminate a corner of the musical universe. And if these original songs provide any light, it is in great part a reflection of some past brilliance that we admire.

Inside Studio A at United Recording in Hollywood, for three and a half days in April, the company around us also felt legendary. Five superlative horn players steeped in the trad jazz scene, some going back forty years. A rhythm section comprised of three eminent session players who we've listened to and read about in DownBeat Magazine since high school. They told stories about playing with Benny Goodman, James Brown, Bill Evans, and Tony Bennett! And in the control room, keeping us on task, was Dan Knobler, who engineered, mixed, and produced this album, dynamically capturing the interplay between these wonderful musicians in the single open room we all shared.

Eleven of these songs are my own, and I'll say a bit about the thrill of writing in this style. I love stories told by characters. The era's repertoire is rooted in songs for theater and films, so a lot are written in the first person and from the perspective of a dramatis persona, rather than reflecting an omniscient narrator or the writer themself. I also love how the music of language is explored in this idiom. Three-in-one singer-lyricist-composers of the time — like Johnny Mercer or Peggy Lee — made clever use of slant rhymes and dense consonant combinations to propel the rhythm of their music. Their songs "ac-cent-tchu-ate" the chaotic and amusing ways that syllables run together, and how the mouth dances to put them across. Like Johnny and Peg, I love to write songs about feelings that feel good to sing.

– VILRAY, New York City, Summer 2022

Megan Burtt was born and bred in Denver, CO. “I’ve always written songs,” she says. “I took piano lessons when I was young, but when I picked up my dad’s old classical guitar, things took off.” Inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Burtt taught herself to play, dreaming of a musical career. “I didn’t know any girls who played music, but Blue, Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time and the women on the MTV videos I saw, let me know it was possible.”
Burtt attended the Berklee School of Music in Boston. There she made two EPs she calls her “practice records.” “As soon as I met other musicians, I put together a band and started playing". We took every gig we could get. I loved being on stage with such talented players. It developed my ear, made my guitar playing more solid and made me a confident bandleader and performer.”
When she graduated from Berklee, Burtt moved to Mississippi to investigate the roots of American blues music. While there, she contracted a potentially fatal disease, but she never stopped singing or performing, and eventually found her way to full recovery. She played music in Vietnam for a couple of months, then returned to the States to record It Ain’t Love, a 12 song collection she made with the friends that still make up the backbone of her recording band - Louis Cato, guitarist Adam Tressler and James Williams. One of the songs on the album, “Waiting for June,” won Best Song at the 2010 Rocky Mountain Folk Festival and the 2011 Kerrville New Folk Competition.
In 2013, Burtt began writing and pre-production on the songs that would become The Bargain, produced by Louis Cato (Bobby McFerrin, Marcus Miller, Snarky Puppy, Mariah Carey) a talented multi-instrumentalist, and longtime member of Burtt’s backing band.
After two years of careful production, The Bargain arrives on August 25th, 2015 to show off Cato’s creative production and Burtt’s bold vocals. “It’s more honest and evolved than my first album,” Burtt says. “I’m beyond excited to start sharing these songs with my fans. I’m tying a bow around this album, knowing that I put everything I had to give into it.”