David Gahan & Soulsavers' latest LP, Imposter, came together so smoothly that Gahan wondered at times when the other proverbial shoe was going to drop.

Gahan and nine other musicians curated songs for the record, arranged and recorded them all at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La recording studio in southern California in November of 2019.

The album was mixed and mastered a few months later in London when the other shoe — the COVID pandemic — did indeed come crashing down.

"[Shangri-La] itself was like this perfect setting to do this [album]," Gahan tells Q104.3's Out of the Box with Jonathan Clarke. "It's one of those situations where you just kept pinching yourself like, 'When's this going to go south?' And it just didn't.

"Each day we would get another song done, another song done. The chemistry was just there between us. Then, we went off to London, Rich [Machin] and I, in January [2020] with Marta Salogni to mix the record. After that, I spent a little bit of time with my mum over there, came back to New York and then all hell broke loose. That was it."

Gahan & Soulsavers sat on the fully-completed album for almost a full two years until it was released on November 12.

Imposter finds Gahan & Soulsavers tackle 12 splendidly reimagined versions of classic songs by the likes of Cat Power, Charlie Chaplin, Bob Dylan, Mark Lanegan, Neil Young and many others.

Gahan and co. talked at length about how to ensure that the album wouldn't sound like a covers album.

"It was about getting a collection of songs that when we finished would be a complete set of work that would play alongside each other and would sound like they were coming from one band, one singer," he explained. "For me, the challenge really was to remove those original versions from my mind and be able to perform the songs. ...I wanted the album to play out like it was a performance from start to finish that would take you, the listener, on a journey of a song."

Watch the full conversation via the player above!

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