It’s no secret that I’ve been enamoured of late with the new singles from homegrown singer-songwriter Mark Sholtez. So it was a bit of a thrill to chat to the man himself today about recording his new album The Distance Between Two Truths, his songwriting process, and his brand new sound.

I saw you live several years ago when your music had more of a jazz flavour, but these days your sound has a mellow acoustic pop-rock feel. Has that been a natural evolution for you?
It really has. I’ve been thinking about this a fair bit, and I think ultimately it stems out of the fact that I wrote most of these tunes on the road and being in hotel rooms with acoustic guitars, and not really being anywhere near pianos. And then when it came time to record these tunes, at the heart of all the songwriting was just these really simply acoustic guitar vocal performances. So that’s at the heart of this new record.

It seems like a rather dramatic shift to an outsider considering this is only your second album. How have your fans reacted to the new direction your music has taken?
I just finished doing a little tour around the country, and I purposely played acoustically and kept it really simple. And I was really surprised that people are connecting to this new stuff really positively. And I think that it probably helped that I played the majority of this new album on that tour and as well I played about half of that first record, but in that acoustic format. You can really see that at the heart of both records is that same singer-songwriter, but it’s just dressed up slightly differently.

I believe you contacted producer Larry Klein to work on The Distance Between Two Truths because you were a fan of his work. Did he live up to your expectations?
He really did. I love Larry’s work on a few levels. One, he’s an amazing musician and he has a great attention to detail in arrangements, and he’s a really song-focused producer. And secondly, he seems to be able to reference all of these beautiful old records. With Madeleine Peyroux he references old Billie Holiday stuff. And then the singer-songwriter stuff he does, he manages to reference things like Neil Young and JJ Cale, but the album’s come out sounding contemporary. And that’s one of the things I wanted to do. I wanted to make something that felt like a classic singer-songwriter record but still was very much contemporary work, and Larry really delivered in that department I think.
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