About Us

Sinclair Soul is an original rock and roll group consisting of producer, composer and arranger Ric Albano, multi-instrumentalist Bret Alexander and drummer / percussionist Ron Simasek. The music is a diverse breath of rock n’ roll, drawing from multiple classic American genres like folk, blues, and country, but with a slight modern twist.

The project derived from a previous musical endeavor called Imaginary Lines, with scores of original music composed, recorded and produced at Saturation Acres Recording Studio in Danville, PA between 2005 and 2009. The product of those sessions was a triple-length album entitled Imaginary Lines 33 in 2009.

Three years later, Albano conceived of a new rock music concept which he named “Sinclair Soul” after a jocular alter-ego he had introduced through the years. Much in the tradition of Imaginary Lines, songs were composed on piano for this new initiative. However, the project did not immediately take off as a planned 2013 debut record was suspended due to technical and logistical issues (several of the songs written for this defunct 2013 album were later re-constructed for Ric Albano’s 2022 solo record Another Rock to Roll).

In 2016, Albano decided to re-interpret and re-mix some Imaginary Lines tracks and returned to Saturation Acres (then located in Dupont, PA). This year also saw him composing a new series of songs on acoustic guitar, which ultimately led to him officially launching Sinclair Soul. Following a trip with his wife to many significant historic music locations throughout the American south, The Journey was inspired, compiled and released in mid 2017. This seven-track debut Sinclair Soul album featured four new versions of Imaginary Lines songs along with three new acoustic-based songs written in 2016. The process worked so well that it was a catalyst for much more music to come with a total of five Sinclair Soul albums released between 2017 and 2023.

During the winter of 2017-18 a second album was recorded and compiled in much the same vein as the debut. Reflections of Relevance was a loose concept album focused on stories inspired by Albano’s original hometown of Hazleton, PA.

The Good Guys was commenced in late 2018 with a massive studio session in December of that year, followed by a solid year of additional recording, mixing and mastering sessions before it’s release in late 2019. This record marked the first time a majority of production was done at Paul Smith’s Eight Days a Week Studio (8DAWS) in Northumberland, PA and (along with the core 3 members) it includes a posse of top-notch musicians and producers, including Smith, vocalist Mycenea Worley, guitarist Phil Brosius and engineer Jake Albano (Ric’s son).

Following this ambitious recording in 2019, Albano planned to dedicate 2020 on live performances. But of course, the COVID pandemic nixed those plans. With too much time at home, Ric decided to try recording some lo-fi, simple songs on his own home recording devices. During April and May 2020, he prolifically wrote many songs, so many in fact that he had enough make two full records. So he decided to separate these out into two different projects, with those calling for more complex arrangements held for the group recordings at 8DAWS. Ric Albano’s debut solo record, Out There Somewhere was released in October 2020, followed in December of that year by the Christmas-themed single “Wednesday” (later included in the Saturday Morning Car Tunes compilation album). The Girl with No Name, the fourth overall Sinclair Soul record in the summer of 2021, returning to the roots of Sinclair Soul with the core three of Albano, Alexander, and Simasek being the only musicians featured on this rich collection of songs. With the success of The Girl with No Name, Albano decided to follow a similar pattern over the succeeding two years, albeit with each of these next two projects done in a more methodical way.

In 2022, he worked on his second solo record, Another Rock to Roll. Unlike his debut however, this record drew from a lot of previously written songs – many from the original, unreleased Sinclair Soul project a decade earlier and some dating back as far as 2005. The result was a very introspective and solid record with (just like on Out There Somewhere) Albano playing every single instrument.

When the song “Find Another Soul” was composed in late 2022, Ric instantly knew that this should be the final song on the final Sinclair Soul album. So 2023 was dedicated to producing this final album of 12 originals called Frequencies, which was dropped on New Year’s Eve, the final day of 2023. Frequencies was the largest and lengthiest Sinclair Soul record to date, featuring 12 tracks of solid classic-style rock n’ roll with various sub-genres, which we anticipate to be the pinnacle of this music project.

With the new material concluded, the focus was shifted to curating unreleased material as an epilogue to this music project. July 2024 brought Imaginary Cube, a 27-track compilation of songs composed during the Imaginary Lines period (2004-2009). This was followed by collection of basement-tape style recordings along with other, more recently composed but yet unreleased material called Saturday Morning Car Tunes, released in May 2025 as a second large compilation with 25 songs. Finally in 2026 came the release of Pieces of the Past, a 14 song collection recorded over the entire 20-year period of the group (2005-2025). This collection mainly includes fresh takes on previously recorded songs along with a few tracks which were previously unreleased, including some of our earliest recordings to make this a fitting conclusion to book-end the Sinclair Soul canon.

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