Reported by Imani Wj Wright
There’s a certain calm that sits inside Rich Meyer, from the band Ghost of Past Mistakes, when he speaks about music. Not excitement in the noisy sense, but something grounded, lived-in, like a man who has walked a full circle just to find himself holding the instrument he started with. Our conversation didn’t feel like an interview. It felt like a return.
Rich has history behind him– years touring with Hopewell, decades soaking in influences from Todd Rundgren, The Cars and Big Star to Pink Floyd and The Beatles … but Ghost of Past Mistakes is something different. Something closer to the bone. “This album is my baby,” he told me, and he didn’t say it as a cliché. He said it the way someone says my name, my home, my child. Tender, proud, fully accountable.
The birth of the record wasn’t glamorous. It was hands-on, imperfect, and alive. Years after Hopewell slowed its engine, Rich picked up a guitar and started playing solo sets in Brooklyn. No big label, no safety net, just songs forming from muscle memory and instinct. “If you don’t care about money, I got slots for you,” a friend told him. Rich took the slots. And slowly, those quiet sets began forming the bones of a new world.
The studio story sounds like rock folklore: ten songs tracked in two days, like it was 1972, with guitar amps double-mic’d, inspired by Andy Johns. Tones stretched across Les Paul Jr.s, SGs, Teles, as if he was painting with wood and copper instead of oils. Meyer laughed remembering the moment when producer John Epperly asked to double-mic the bass: “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you.” It was instinct meeting instinct, a creative lock-in.
For all the technical detail though, emotion sits at the center of this record. “I want listeners to be inspired the way I’ve been inspired by records,” he told me. Not inspired by the industry — inspired by the private act of listening. The kind of inspiration that makes a kid rewind a solo, flip a vinyl back to side A, or wake up dreaming of the guitar tone they heard the night before. Rich knows that feeling. He’s chased that feeling.
And now he’s returned to it.
Ghost of Past Mistakes, the album, and Ghost of Past Mistakes, the band, were born at different moments but breathe the same air. Bassist and vocalist Meyer, guitarist Pete Thompson, drummer Alan Camlet three voices, three harmonies, one evolving pulse. Their cohesion doesn’t stop on wax either, when they play live, they inhabit it the same qualities you hear on the self-titled. Songs bend, stretch, breathe differently than they did in the studio. They personify music as a living organism.
The artwork folds the concept inward, a real photograph of the 2020 Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, the “Christmas Star.” Meyer had it filtered into an oil painting-esque finish, a cosmic metaphor for the record’s tone. Two celestial bodies, separate, then aligned- past and present meeting in a brief electric kiss. A perfect visual for an album born from reflection, rebuilt from memory, then pushed toward possibility.
Rich speaks like a man in motion— not rushing, but moving forward with intention. Digital promotion, licensing, live performance, slow-burn growth. Nothing hurried. Nothing careless. Just years of sound, muscle, lineage and dreams condensed into ten tracks tracked in two days.
Ghost of Past Mistakes is about reclamation. It’s a musician looking at every missed moment and deciding to make something anyway,
He’s not chasing the past.
He’s collaborating with it.
Check it out HERE
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