“People in a room making music together with real instruments.” That’s how Michael Harrison Berg paraphrases the words that were written on a whiteboard in the studio where his Van Ghost project tracked their new album, The Ghost Unit, in late December 2014. Staying true to that mantra, Berg, along with co-lead singer and trumpet player Jennifer Hartswick and an all-star cast of musicians, laid down the record in six collaboration-fueled, family-rooted days that revitalized a group whose last recording endeavor, Berg says, “put a dagger in the band, at least temporarily.”

Those words on the whiteboard were actually written by Trey Anastasio while he was recording his most recent album with his solo band, at the same studio where Van Ghost tracked their sessions—Anastasio’s Barn in Vermont, which has hosted an impressive stream of artists in its almost two decades in operation, from Phish to Béla Fleck and Patty LaBelle. And, now, Van Ghost.

Hartswick, a longtime member of Trey Anastasio Band, is certainly no stranger to The Barn, a place that she calls “a second home,” and where she’s spent a great deal of time over the past 16 years. This time around, she and Van Ghost entered the storied space to record The Ghost Unit a week before Christmas, as the Vermont winter began in earnest and when, as Hartswick puts it, “everybody was feeling extra lovey and it was snowy and delicious up there. It really is a special place. There’s nothing sterile about it—it’s very homey.”

“It’s not a traditional studio where the producer is behind a glass window,” adds Berg. “It’s literally a big barn. Everything is open and you are in one big room together. And even though, from a modern engineering world [perspective], that’s actually a challenge to recording, on a human level, it’s everything we wanted. It puts everybody in the same energy and in the same collective consciousness at the same time.”

Berg, who has worked as a promoter in Chicago since the early aughts, had his first experience at The Barn over a decade ago while overseeing a session with a group he was managing at the time. Coincidentally, it was a quip from a frustrated band member that helped Berg make the decision to attempt a jump to the creative side of the music business.

“It started to get kind of heated,” Berg recalls of those studio sessions that eventually set him down his current path. “What ended up happening was they were like, ‘You think you know it all? Then why don’t you go fucking make a record?’ And I was like, ‘Alright, I guess I should!’” From there, Berg says he “caught the bug” of songwriting, which happened to coincide with Hartswick’s move to Chicago. She met up with Berg, learned some of his songs, and Van Ghost was born soon after, opening for the Jennifer Hartswick Band at Metro Chicago.

With all the positive vibes surrounding the recording process for their new record, it’s hard to believe that, just a few years earlier, Van Ghost experienced a studio session that nearly killed the band entirely. Coming off• a successful debut, Melodies for Lovers, Berg and Hartswick landed a label deal and were teamed up for their next album, The Domino Effect, with accomplished Nashville producer and engineer Justin Niebank, who won a Grammy for his work on Taylor Swift’s 2008 album Fearless and whose list of credits is a veritable who’s who of Music City superstars. “The literal Nashville-mafia-type stuff•,” jokes Berg.

“Justin has such an incredible pedigree of success with mainstream radio, they were so convinced that, if he produced this record and we let him lead the charge on the release plan, we would be a success,” explains Berg. “In hindsight, what he tried to do was make a cool record for him. He made us his version of Van Ghost, and we all felt it abandoned our existing fan base.”

“What was produced was an incredible pop record,” Hartswick adds. “It just wasn’t necessarily the intention of the artists to do that. The way the band came about was in such a grassroots and honest way, and Michael is the kind of songwriter where his songs don’t follow a formula—that’s what I really like about the way he writes music. I think the recording of that album got a little bit formulaic, and some of the rawness got shoved aside.”

Natalie Cressman, who lends her voice and trombone to The Ghost Unit (and has played with Hartswick in TAB for years), was present for one day of tracking during the Domino Effect sessions— an experience that taught her an important lesson about newer bands coming up in the business.

“I think what ended up happening was that the product didn’t really represent what the band was about,” says Cressman. “Honestly, by the time it was ready to be put out, I think Berg didn’t believe in it quite as much because it just got so far removed from the way that the band sounded live. I’ve been told that the ideal scenario is having a label backing and being able to hire a big-shot producer who takes your music to the next level. But I think the di•fference between these two records shows that you need to find the right fit and, sometimes, the right fit is doing it yourself with people you’re comfortable around—feeling free to try out ideas and seeing what works best, while still staying true to the music.”

In stark contrast to that experience, Van Ghost’s six days at The Barn were everything Berg and Hartswick could have wanted, with each member of the collective providing their own input, thanks in part to the leadership of Berg, who admits that he’s a bit out of his league in such tenured company.

“Ultimately—I hate to use this phrase, because I don’t think of myself this way, but, as far as the rest of [them], it’s an all-star band,” he says, “because it’s like, this guy from this [group] and this guy from this one.” More specifically, the recording session was rounded out by co-songwriter Chris Gelbuda, The Nth Power guitarist Nick Cassarino, former North Mississippi Allstars bassist and Hartswick’s husband Chris Chew, Big Gigantic saxophonist Dominic Lalli, Chicago-based guitarist Grant Tye, Matisyahu keyboardist Rob Marscher and drummer John Staten, who has worked with Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe and Pimps of Joytime. Not a bad backing crew for a promoter-turned-bandleader.

“That’s a real testament to the kind of personality that Michael has,” Cressman says. “He brought together a group of people that was personally and musically compatible, but he was also considerate enough to empower us to be as involved as we wanted on every level. As a freelancer, it makes me feel comfortable when someone is giving you that freedom to come up with ideas and put your own stamp on it. There was a lot of tossing the ‘talking stick’ back and forth.”

One song on Ghost Unit in particular encapsulates the collaborative and communicative atmosphere in which the album was created. “Follow Me,” a tune that shows the funkier side of the Americana-leaning Van Ghost, was originally written by Berg but features lead vocals from Hartswick, bridge vocals from Cressman, horn charts written by both women and a saxophone solo from Lalli. It was mostly produced by Cassarino, who employed his Nth Power-honed style to make the song one of the highlights of the record.

“I opened Pandora’s box with him, where we were egging him on and, all of a sudden, he was kind of in the driver’s seat,” says Berg. “With that song, the original vision of it was to be a funk song, and then you take someone who has that soulful funk background and let him lead the charge on it, and it ended up becoming even better than I thought.”

While all the members of Van Ghost felt like family by the end of the process—to the point that they considered changing their name to The Ghost Unit to reflect it— Hartswick and Cressman were sisters long before this session. Both women found themselves working with Anastasio at very young ages—Hartswick at 17 and Cressman at 18 (when she auditioned via a sit-in with Hartswick’s band)—and both find strength in working with each other.

“She’s just, honestly, hands down, one of the best singers I’ve ever worked with,” says Cressman. “One thing I’ve learned is being a good person and having a good vibe is just as important as being a badass at whatever you do, and I think she’s an embodiment of both of those things.”

For her part, Hartswick welcomed the opportunity to help out someone coming into the music business in a similar fashion as she had. “I did feel like I had been there before and could probably steer her out of the situations I had gotten myself into,” she says. “A lot of times, you’re gonna be looked at di•fferently, or less than, or as somebody’s girlfriend, you know? You’re just not treated with the same respect as any 20-year-old guy would be coming into the band.

“But I would say the same thing to a young woman as I would to a young man, which is: Work. Work hard. Practice. Do all the stu•ff that you’re supposed to do because opportunities will come. You’re gonna get those gigs before other people because you can do that. You have to work. There is no shortcut.”

While the players who created The Ghost Unit have busy schedules that don’t easily allow for them to tour, they’re not quite ready to forget the magic that took place in The Barn, and they plan to play together despite the hurdles. “It’s almost impossible—I can’t believe we got together for the record,” says Hartswick. “But anything worth doing might be a little hard. It might have to be in 2019, but we’ll get it together.”