Sleeve Notes
"I know that I once said that I didn't intend to release any more CDs of Stan's work. There has been an ongoing request for a "Best of". Remastering the first five of his albums became an ideal situation on many levels. I think Paul has sufficiently explained all that's happened to bring this CD to life. We hope you like it. Yes, there are bound to be those among you who may not agree 100% with the choices, but you'll have to admit we've come pretty close to the ideal. That said, saying anything more than "Enjoy!" would be superfluous."
— Ariel Rogers
Producer's Notes
"For a long time Ariel and I had been talking about releasing a compilation recording of some of Stan's best work and, at the same time, I had been hoping to remaster these recordings using the modern digital technology now available. Last year, Ariel decided the time had come and she agreed to release a "Best of Stan Rogers" CD and remaster the entire catalogue at the same time. I was very excited to be asked to take on the production responsibility.
The first step was to unearth the original tapes containing the final mixes of all the original recordings. Ariel rolled up to my place a couple of months ago with a trunk full of tapes and we hauled them into my living room for a look-see. Sitting through these tapes was a real trip down memory lane for me, bringing back lots of memories of those wonderful recording sessions back in the seventies and early eighties. We were able to find the originals- fortunately, I had labeled accurately back then.
I then took the mix tapes to Richard Hess's place to have them transferred into the digital audio format. Besides being a great fan of Stan's music, Richard has built a solid reputation as one of the best in the business at restoring old tapes. It's not simply a matter of playing them back into a digital converter. The process often involves baking the tape for several hours to stabilize the backing so the tape can be played without the oxide being stripped off. Then it's finding just the right tape player and aligning it to the tape being played. For the techies among you, everything was transferred using a sampling frequency of 96KHz and a word length of 24 bits. This provides the highest quality digital reproduction available today.
I then took the digitized audio to João Carvahlo at João Carvahlo Mastering in Toronto. This is one of the finest mastering facilities in Canada and João has possibly the best set of ears in the business. I worked closely with João and through a painstaking process of careful manipulation, tone shaping, and digital processing he was able to bring new life to these tracks.
So all of the records are now remastered to the highest standards using the latest technology and we have chosen 16 tracks for this collection. Deciding what to choose for a best of collection was tricky but among the titles here are Stan's most popular and enduring songs along with a few others that show him as the songwriting master he was.
I want to thank Richard and João for the great care and skill they brought to this work and, of course, Ariel for making it all possible. We hope you will enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as we have enjoyed putting it all together."
— Paul Mills, Toronto, October, 2009