Your Sweet Action. Is it a band? Is it a solo album? Is it a silly thing that my wife used to say all the time? Well, the answer to all 3 questions is a resounding YES. Maybe I should start from the beginning…

An 8-year-old RL discovers his mom’s electric guitar while playing at Grandma Heyer’s house; oh wait, not that far back!

It was 2012. The True Spokes had released our “debut” album, changing our name from Flowmotion. We were in the midst of realizing that some naysayers were right about a name change being certain death for a band, yet we still had the resolve to keep this fire burning. Josh Clauson, Scott Goodwin, Bob Rees, Eric Bryson, and myself had been off to a bit of a
rocky start for this new chapter, and Eric actually was calling it quits. He and his wife were expecting a new baby and he didn’t really see himself spending weeks in the van with 4 other guys as a part of early fatherhood - understandably. We started toying with the idea of just being a 4-piece, with Josh and I trading off on bass duties, and Bob jumping in on synth bass if we wanted to guitar out. We were all writing and I was recording demos in my basement, which was also our rehearsal spot. We already had a good nest-egg of songs that didn’t get put on the first record and I was pushing us to keep it going, perhaps even just recording the album at
my house. This may have partly been due to the $30,000 price tag the album rang up, but I also felt empowered after watching David Simon-Baker (DSB) engineer the first record at Mission Bells in San Francisco with Tim Bluhm producing. DSB is a master and I learned a TON watching him work, and Tim had such a wonderful sensibility that it was hard not to think every album we put out from here on out would be a smash hit. Lol

At some point, Josh began to back-pedal on the True Spokes and that resistance made me decide to just put out a solo album, using the demos I had been recording. I had 8 songs ready to go and was feeling pretty good about them, then I watched Sound City, a documentary about the studio of the same name. Around the same time, I watched Runnin’ Down A Dream, the Tom Petty doc. I started to become obsessed with taking a band into the studio and cutting the right take live off the floor. When I listened back to my solo album, most of which was performed by me, multi-tracked to death, it just didn’t sound good anymore. I was about
to scrap it and take the songs into a studio with a band (I tried starting a band called Sweet Action around this time). Then, we moved.

My wife, Kelsey was pregnant with our son, Simon so I packed up the studio and the grow scene (a story for another time), and moved into a house owned by some friends (Noah and Jenna) we knew through the Bruces (Ben and Erin). That’s the point I sold the grow gear and went full-bore into music performance for all further income. Needless to say, I was a little too busy to care about that collection of songs, plus I had another band, Cracker Factory that released our 3rd album (kind of a reboot of the band) and we were working on our 4th.

The bliss (and stress) of parenting took over and before we knew it, Simon was 3 months old and Kelsey was going back to work. We figured childcare would be a breeze with me taking daytime duty and her at night while I played (non-stop) gigs. During one of Simon’s afternoon naps, I thought about that lost solo album and went into the studio to pull it up. With a fresh set of ears, I actually though it had potential without rerecording everything with a live band. I called my friend Kevin Jenkins to have him master it and ended up releasing it in December of 2014, just before Simon turned 1!

The album was called Sweet Action. For the release show, I put a band together with some of my favorite players and people to play my songs. Kathy Moore shredding guitar, Norman Baker grooving that bass with Daniel Nash on the drums, Steve Scalfati on keys, and Bob Rees on vibraphone and percussion made for a crazy super group and a very special night.

At that show, Adam Williams asked if The True Spokes would play a show with his band at the Triple Door in a few months. That band had called it quits earlier in the year, but I offered to put something else together. He asked if this band would do it and we said yes, as RL Heyer’s Sweet Action. Steve had just got the gig with Reggie Watts on the James Corden show, so he was in LA, but I had been playing quite a bit with Joe Doria, so he was the perfect fit. Bob had a teaching gig and was unavailable and I asked Jacques Willis to play all the notes. He kindly obliged. Shortly after that show, Daniel moved to Colorado and Scott jumped in. This band was
really too good to be true. We played several shows in Seattle, and eventually I figured we could fulfill the original idea of taking the band into the studio and cutting the album live off the floor!

I started a crowdfunding campaign, asking for enough to cover the cost of the studio, pressing copies, promotion (including a video or two), and paying the players - this would be a full week in the studio and everyone has to pay bills. Well, I’m not very good at asking for money, and pretty terrible at self-promotion, so we ended up with about 15% of what we needed. My pivot was 3 days in Studio Litho with Floyd Reitsma engineering, paying the musicians out of pocket, and doing the rest myself at my home studio. I did end up tracking some vocals over at Blash Studios as trade for some guitar/bass work I had done, and Joe recorded the keys at his studio. Everything was coming together nicely, albeit slowly.

There was a point at which I realized this band WAS too good to be true. Every single member was a top-call musician and therefore supremely busy, so it became more and more rare to play shows with all 6 of us, and eventually at all. Still, I kept on with the album, finished the vocals, asked Ian Sheridan to mix it, and started trying to conceptualize a release strategy. I also started a new band called Bigtooth with Tim Kennedy (who played on a couple tracks on this record), so time was getting more and more valuable. Then it was 2020…

Well, no rush anymore. Ian mixed it again, after I did another take of vocals on a couple things. He mastered it. He knocked it out of the park! I released a record at the end of 2021 of all the remote recordings and home recordings I had done during the “dark times.” I didn’t know how to build the momentum back up with Your Sweet Action enough to release this album and toiled over it for a couple years. Then I started thinking about the criteria for this being an album released under my own name. Did I write all the songs? Yes. Did I produce this album? Yes. Am I the one paying for everything (well, 85% of everything)? Yes. It seems to me like this was my band, and while I dreamed of it becoming a collective and incorporating all the amazing songwriters and vocalists into the music, it never got there. Now I present to you, with the help of so many, Your Sweet Action, the album.

This is by no means a "solo" record! It features some of the best musicians in Seattle, and some of my closest friends!