We posted last month with news about the soon-to-be-released instrumental project from Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder. Entitled, Instrumentals, it features 11 tracks with Skaggs and his band, on a set of tunes authored by Ricky himself.

CMT.com has a nice feature on the CD up today, written by Edward Morris which captures Skaggs’ thoughts about releasing his first all-instrumental project after so many years in bluegrass and country music. Here’s a taste:

Taking a bunch of instrumentals from the recording studio to the concert stage can be tricky, Skaggs admits. He recently previewed the album to a group of music industry people and found the whole experience a bit awkward.

“Honestly, it felt strange to me as a bandleader to stand there and play six songs in a row with no singing,” he explains. “It’s kind of odd because you don’t really know how to set up the song. It’s not like you can say, ‘Here’s an old Stanley Brothers song that I grew up listening to and me and Keith Whitley sang together,’ or, ‘Here’s one I used to sing with Ralph [Stanley],’ or, ‘Here’s one of Monroe’s classics.’ How often do people want to hear you say, ‘Well, I wrote this one on the bus’?”

You can read the whole article online on CMT’s site, where they also have a photo gallery from the CD release show in July.

Audio samples from all 11 tracks can be found on the Skaggs Family web site, where special pricing is currently available for online orders.