Here are the liner notes:

If somebody had told me in the year 2000 that Isotope was going to be the final studio album by The Lavone, I would have said they were crazy. It seemed at the time that Isotope was a peak, a resurgence of our band. The gigs we played in 1999 and 2000 seemed to confirm it. After 14 years of hard work and general obscurity it never felt more like there was a bright future for The Lavone.

Between 1986 and 1993, we wrote and recorded a ridiculous 14 albums, 6 of those double-length (that’s basically 20 LP’s worth of original material in 7 years… crazy). After I got married in late 1992, real life set in and there was a gap of about 6 years before we managed to finish our second-to-last album titled (appropriately enough “The Hiatus”) shortly after I divorced. It felt so good to have finally finished The Hiatus, I’ll always remember that night at my apartment doing the mix and master, taking pictures for the cover and acting giddy and silly with Rhett over our long-overdue success. The most natural thing in the world was to move ahead with another album and move ahead we did.

Isotope simply flew together. The sessions were fun, productive, and amazing. We were recording fully-digital for the first time with unlimited tracks available to us. Songs like “Floatin’” and “Blues Around My Soul” were probably the most ornate and impressive works of baroque pop music Rhett ever put down. More than anything, recording Isotope felt like a return to the days when we were in high school cranking out albums left and right on the creative high of our lives. The Hiatus had no momentum, Isotope had the momentum of a freight train.

And it turned out to be the end of thestory of The Lavone. To this day, 7 years later, that’s still hard to comprehend but that’s what happened. I got remarried in late 2000 and again things slowed down. We kept recording, but several other factors conspired to make it difficult. Brian, our newest member, moved out of state. I started feeling a desire to try some solo work and attempted to start a second band (the short-lived “Steve the Band”) with my new wife. Rhett became a dad. We didn’t stop recording, we just slowed down a bit and in that slowdown a year went by, then two, then three. Over that time we both drifted further and further apart musically until eventually I became frustrated and wanted to put the band on hold indefinitely. On September 3 2003, Rhett and I spoke on the phone about it and decided that The Lavone would never truly end as long as we were both still alive but that we would consider it done after one more gig.

That last gig never happened. In early 2004 I went through another divorce and some personal issues and it was postponed. On July 4th 2005, Rhett died from blood clots that formed in his legs and moved into his lungs. The Lavone, which had been put on indefinite hold two years earlier, truly ended on that day. Isotope was our last studio album. Our final performance, a set played at The Depot in Hopkins MN in 2000 was finished up as a live album in 2001 and is officially the final album. It contains material that, had The Lavone continued in the mode of Isotope, should have made up the next Lavone album, but the bootleg audio quality is poor and it only hints at what we could have been.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Isotope, the last hurrah in the 17 year saga of The Lavone.

Ryan Sutter
July 13, 2007

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