🎧 Discover the architecture of improv: Blueprints on vinyl from Umphrey’s McGee

We’re proud to offer the new studio album Blueprints from Umphrey’s McGee — a release that documents the creative crossroads where live improvisation meets studio discipline.

Rather than composing behind closed doors, Umphrey’s asked fans to vote on their favorite moments of live improvisation, identifying the spontaneous musical ideas that felt like songs waiting to be finished. Over the years, more than 20 compositions have been built this way as part of the band’s UMBowl event. Blueprints collects the best of those collaborations from recent years, giving them the care and attention they deserve.

The band then took those raw building blocks—improvisational segments from shows across the country—and began piecing them together. It wasn’t always seamless. Sometimes it felt like musical surgery: a verse from New York, stitched to a bridge from Chicago, capped off by a peak from Philadelphia. What began as scattered moments evolved into complete thoughts—expansive, unconventional, but cohesive and fully realized.

The result is six expansive compositions, each made up of smaller, standalone sections. Understanding that not every listener wants to commit to a 14-minute track, the band indexed each piece into multiple parts, allowing fans to explore the individual components or experience them as complete works.

The physical album reflects the same approach. Each song is paired with a hand-drawn blueprint inspired by an actual pedal from the band’s gear, annotated with the date and location of each musical segment’s origin. Embedded within the artwork are lyrical fragments—small emotional guideposts that help tie it all together.

Recording took place in an unlikely setting: a small, upstairs theater hidden above Chicago’s iconic Metro venue called Top Note. The band used it as both a studio and a sounding board, workshopping the songs during the day and playing them for small groups of fans by night. It was messy, iterative, and deeply rewarding.

Blueprints stands as a testament to what’s possible when barriers between artist and audience dissolve. It’s a project that recognizes that great music doesn’t always start with a plan, one that honors spontaneity while embracing careful craft. The result is not just an album but a new model for collaborative creation—one where the whole includes not just the music but the community that helped bring it into being.