We just played back through all 14 tracks we’ve worked on with Kyle and Dave.  It was pretty overwhelming to hear everything back-to-back. It sounds like all of the sounds and parts are there–it just needs tightened up and a little TLC.  In Dave’s hands, I’m sure it will turn out to be something listenable.  Haha.  Seriously though, we have heard these songs so many times we need to not listen to them for the next few weeks in order to gain a little perspective on the beast we have just set free.

Some glitch on my phone reset EVERYTHING–which means I have no contact numbers.  So if you are reading this, please send me a text with your name so I can make sure I have everyone.  There are several people whom I promised I’d call when I return and I will undoubtedly feel like a jerk when I cannot

So rather than try to make a sweeping statement about this experience, I’d like to keep it simple and to the point:  thank you to Kyle, and Mary for dealing with us these weeks.  We feel like part of your family and being thousands of miles from home, that means everything to us.  Thanks to Dave and everyone at KSL for doing such a bang-up job and letting us run wild.  And thank you to everyone who has cared enough read this and follow me on our latest  journey. We love all of you–as I try to remind you every post–and I mean that sincerely.

As for the record?  I’ll let that speak for itself.  Whatever it turns out to be, its a still life of who we are at this moment in time.  And in the end, I suppose thats all we can do.  But we’re excited about what we’ve made and are looking forward to everyone’s feedback.

Until we meet again.

Hello...Goodbye

xoxo

-B

The past several days have gone by in flashes but I’ll give you a run down.  Firstly, we returned to Crazy Girls for a third time (well…in Adam & Woody’s case a fourth. Don’t ask…)  in order to finish a project that we’d started there the week prior.  We didn’t actually play or anything, so we got back to the studio that night and continued working.

Mostly, we’ve just been tightening up the loose odds and ends.  A hand clap here, a glockenspiel there.  Maybe an accordion tomorrow.  I’ve never played one so I’m kind of excited to try it.  Woody got to get tribal with a serious-looking percussion rig:

Pick your poison.

Dave’s been checking in every few days to make sure we haven’t totally ruined everything. haha.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

We did have some fun last night adding group vocals in the hallway.  Look at our faces–we’re having fun, right?

Waitin' for a bus?

Afterwards Kyle stopped by to check in & we all walked over to the local bar for a round or six.  There is strong a possibility Joe got KRUUNKED and started dancing all over the floor.  The entire bar was egging him on and, if anyone reading this knows Joe, you are aware that the man needs no egging on.  He woke up this morning with bruises on his legs from knee-sliding James Brown style.  No lie.   Dude was dancin’.

At this point we are still working in shifts to make the best use of our time.  Woody and Adam comped vocals for most of the day and then, as I got to the studio with Joe, they both went out to see a show while team 2 stayed in and recorded bits of vocal harmonies, etc.  We’re all joining in the effort and hopefully can wrap this up tomorrow.  “Haaaands acrosss the wattterrrr….”

Speaking of water, Adam was looking through our LP2 notebook the other day, and he noticed that we seem to be using a lot of nautical imagery and references throughout the songs on this project.  With this in mind, he stopped at one of the literally hundreds of places along the sidewalk where people are just selling their stuff  sitting at card tables, and he purchased this beauty to bring good luck to our last days here and our voyage home:

Only $8!!  We couldn’t think of a name that really suited her, anyone have any ideas?

A friend of mine was kind enough to send me his newest collection of prose & poems and it was delivered to me at the studio the other day.  I’ve just gotten a chance to read it tonight in between songs I am rough-mixing.  Its probably the best thing I’ve read in a while–so if you are into that sort of thing, lemme know and I’ll see if I can hook you up. Very, very good work.

Ah…geeez. Just got an error message while working in a mix of “Julia, Revisted”…this doesn’t look good, does it?:

um, ok

So, I should probably go and deal with this.  The goal is 5 rough mixes done by the end of tonight, 9 more tomorrow and then its back to the ‘burgh.  Everyone cross your fingers for a safe voyage home.  And I’ll see EVERYONE at the Ugly Sweater Show on Friday?  Come by me a beer ’cause I’m brokeass.  haha.  But seriously, we miss you guys and can’t wait to see you as soon as possible.

xoxo

-B

PS–don’t forget to grab “A Very Triggers Christmas” on itunes if you can. Play it for the one you love and keep him/her warm this evening. I’ll be sleeping under a pile of papers…

Workin' hard/hardly workin'

At this point we are almost working in shifts.  Woody will come in either a bit early or stay a bit late to work on protools to edit, comp, etc and then I’ll usually come in every once in a while too–either early or late–to work out some rough mixes.  Then, all of us are around when tracking because we switch off on instruments so often, we kind of need all hands on deck.  For example: Adam got to lay down some banjo today on the still-untitled “Organ Song”:

Practicing his "Deliverence" solo...

I got some harmonies done on “Dead in the Water” and acoustic guitar was tracked on “I Have my Doubts”.  Finally, we started work on “The Sequel” and tomorrow will be filled with fun stuff like bass drums, mallets, cymbals, glockenspiel, concertina, and stick clicks.

The variety of the songs we have recorded has proven to be exciting.  To have found a band whose members can alternate between Moog synths, over-driven Bass VI, and banjo is really a blessing for me. I think the odds of finding people who can switch seamlessly between so many variations of music must be very small indeed.  I only hope everyone enjoys listening to our music half as much as we have had making it.  But if not, the experience has been more than worth all of the effort tenfold.

Well, its about 1:30 AM and I’m off to the studio super-early tomorrow so I’m going to hit the hay.  Here’s the list we worked off of today trying to get some stuff done.  Looks pretty mundane, eh?:

Making a list, checking it twice

Anyways, I hope to see ALL of you on our return on 12/17.  As you know, it will not only be our first day back but our first show back as well.  Can’t wait to hug everyone and get drink in a town where people know what Yuengling is.  For all of those out here in LA who don’t drink Yuengling, Adam has a message for ya:

Whats this "Pacifico" nonsense?!?!

xoxo

-B

So even though we only have 5 days left our here in the studio, we seem to still have a lot to do.  Everyone cross his/her fingers for us that we can pull off this stuff before we have to go…

First things first: We got some shots back from our last show.  I know Adam will be posting a lot of them on Facebook, but I thought I’d at least give you guys a preview of how much fun we had.  Again, some of you  may ask about why we are wearing tuxes.  My response is simply this: please don’t ask, you’ll hopefully find out soon. haha.  But you can see we were enjoying ourselves:

"Mitch Mitchell" Kawood

Rock on!

I love my job...

Again, there are much more of these.  But I’ll let Adam crop them, post them, & generally handle them on facebook. Thats definitely his expertise.  I just thought I’d share with you a couple to give you the flavor of our rock shows out here.

Anywho, on to today.  So, as you know already, we got to the studio right away to start working on horns.  We began with “18 Frames Per Second”.  Dave communicated his ideas to the horn players by referencing various T.V shows and composers from the 70′s (Rockford Files, Burt Bacharach, Herb Albert, etc.)

All in all, a tenor, and bari sax were stacked with a trumpet, trombone, & coronet for “18 Frames” as well as “Run Fast, Run Far”.  I’ll speak for myself when I say it was probably one of the highlights of my recording experience.  I only hope we can get the songs to do justice to the amazing talent these guys showed today.

After that we busted out the ol’ Mellotron.  I’ve never played on of these bad-boys and it is admittedly a little tricky.  But I hope I got the hang of it enough to lay down some flute and string parts on “Wachusett Blues” as well as “I Have My Doubts”.  I got goosebumps listening to the vibrato of those tape flutes coming through the monitors.  NERD….

THEN–as if that wasn’t enough–I needed to find an “Attractions”-style organ for “Dead in the Water”.  I didn’t have a Vox Continental and the B3 isn’t even close to the right sound. But EUREKA, studio “A” has a Farfisa combo organ in it!!  The very same used by the likes of Mr. Nieve himself!  So I put tracked that organ on “Dead” and now hopefully it has some legit Costello sounds bouncing around in it.

We ended the studio evening with Adam laying down some more vocals.  We basically have 90 % of the acoustic guitars, some odds/ends percussion, and a decent amount of vocals still to get done.  Lets hope we can finish it in the next 5 days…

After our session, we went out for some delicious Chinese Food with some friends and hit a bar afterwards. Dave got to pick “Poison Arrow” on the Jukebox so we were all pumped.  Here he is scrutinizing his selection:

So, its about 3:30 AM here and we’ve had a busy day.  Gotta get up and get to the studio soon so I’m gonna run.  I hope everyone isn’t too cold back home–I hear rumors of snow.  We really don’t wanna deal with that driving back cross-country.  Keep your houses warm for us and put on a cup of tea for us…we’re on our way.  Love you

xoxo

-B

Last night I went out to the Troubador in West Hollywood to see the GREAT band “The Keplar Mission.  Very good stuff.

Then this morning, things began simply enough.  We realized that we only had 7 more days (!!) of tracking before we depart from the left coast towards the land of snow and slush.  Being the practical young men that we are (!!), we decided to write out a schedule for the next seven days to make sure everything got done…needless to say we have already strayed from that list.

We started out strong: lead vocals on “I Have My Doubts” and “Quality Beats”.  QBeats in particular I feel as though I can’t really do them any better than I did today.  I’m not saying the vox are “good”–I’m just saying I can’t do them any better. hahaha.  But jokes aside, I am pretty happy with the verses at least.  We spent the rest of the day trying to get some stomp & clap sounds for “Yer Bones”. Its a lot harder than one would think.  The studio rooms are built to deaden sounds so any sort of stomping or clapping is absorbed by the design of the room.  The solution:  dumpsters, plywood, courtyards etc.  Hopefully it turned out ok…but as always, YOU will be the judge of that.  We’ll just do our best and hope you guys think its ok…

Later, Dave came by to check on our progress and it seems as though he thinks things are moving along nicely.  What is so great about Dave is that you can see him soak in the sounds when we play back tracks and if he says nothing, that means things the sounds are where they need to be.  But when he does have a suggestion, its always 110% on target.  We feel really lucky to work with a guy like that.

We then went out and had some Mexican food with Dave.  Check out the size of these Margaritas:

I've made a huge mistake...

We got finished about 9pm and decided to go back to the studio to get things done.  After all, we’re not out here for margaritas and Troubadour shows.  We want to get a record made.

So, the first thing we did is add some Moog on “Julia, Revisited” and QBeats–per Dave’s suggestion.  However, we did something kind of cool–and this next part is only for gearheads and other musicians who care about stuff like this:  What we did is take a piece of an old tape machine Dave had lying around–no reel but with tubes and input/level monitors intact–and ran the Moog through this.  Then, we ran that pre-amp out through the Quad 8 preamp.  The result?  We over-drove both the tubes and the pre for a natural, gritty, and generally bad-ass distortion:

Moog/Tape Machine combo

We were so stoked about the resulting sound, we revisited “Sex Ramp” and re-tracked the guitar solo.  The original idea for the solo was to semi-replicate the guitar solo from “Taxman”–which Mr. McCartney semi-replicated from Mr. Hendrix.  But in order to get an authentic sound, Dave told us we needed to do what the Beatles did–overdrive the tubes and preamp.  So, Adam plugged in the Tele and we cranked it up. Look at the needle:

This goes to 11...

But wow–the sound was amazing.  Very “Revolver”-esque.  Finally, because we were on a roll, we finished the night up with some vocals.  Adam did a few takes of “”Yer Bones”  and we even put his voice through the over-driven tubes for a section of “Company Dime”.  Look at this rig Joe invented, its a paper towel roll with an Styrofoam cup taped to the top:

Sit back down we need a response today!

So, we got home about 1:15 AM this morning and need to be at the studio early in the AM tomorrow to check out the horns.  I’ll definitely take some pictures of that–I’m very much looking forward to it.  I want to apologize for those of you following the bl0g who aren’t into the nitty-gritty parts of recording, etc.  I guess I just am writing about what I do during the day, and this is what I do.  In the meantime, we love you ALL and can’t WAIT to see you again.  Annie got some fantastic ugly sweaters for us for our annual “Ugly Sweater” show on 12/17.  So please, come see us play because we’ll actually just be returning from our tour & recording on that same day.  Buy us a drink–we are all broke. 

Until then, stay warm.  Miss you

xoxo

-B

So this is just a quick post–we were up kinda late last night and so we’ve gotten a little bit of a late start this morning:

Yes ladies...he's single!

We’ve mostly been working to try to tighten up what we already have tracked at this point.  But we did tackle QBeats yesterday and were pleasantly surprised.  I think we finally got an intro on it that we’re all pretty happy with, so lets all cross our fingers.  I think we’ll  just keep working on that one, “Yer Bones”, & “Dead in The Water” today–although we may take a crack at the -as-yet-untitled “Organ Song” as well. It might get craaazy. haha

Lots of vocals happening right now:

Truth be told, this is my least favorite part of making a record.  I really dislike singing and am easily frustrated when I can’t get things to sound the way I want them to.  Although, I feel like this record has been slightly easier for me than our first–mostly because I might be singing a little less on this one.  Lately when I’ve been writing a song, I try my best to get Adam to sing it.  In my opinion, his voice suits what we’re doing a bit more than mine and he seems to enjoy singing much more than I.  Nothing is cooler than when someone does a vocal take on a song of yours and nails it better than you could have. A super proud-parental-kind-of feeling.

With this in mind we tried to do a little research in the studio yesterday.  Here is what Adam was looking up:

This is what I was researching:

And this was the answer to Joe’s query:

I can’t even show you what Woody was looking for–I’m not even sure what “7 Girls, 12 Cups, 1 Camel” even is…? haha.

Ok, gotta run. I’ll post pics of the horn session when it happens on Monday (I know–I posted it was on Tuesday before. I was wrong.) and it should be pretty cool.  Miss you all–be home soon.

This all made us laugh in the studio for about 20 minutes–its worth sitting through the Olive Garden commercial to see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQljzQ_FpUE&feature=fvst

xoxo

-B

We got to really dig in to “Yer Bones” today and it is really starting to take shape.  Its sort of Brian Jonestown-ish.  Put it this way, when I listen to it, it makes me want to guzzle cheap wine & get into knife fights.  ‘Nuff said.  “Sex Ramp,”  however, is kind of kicking our ass.  We can’t seem to get it to sound the way it needs to.  We’ll probably take a break from it for a few days and try to tackle it again this weekend.  Oh yeah, and Tuesday morning we have a session scheduled for horns!  “Horns for which song/songs”, you ask?  Shhh….we’ll leave that a mystery for now.  But we’re all excited for that.

Tonight, of course, was our second “Crazy Girls” show.  And, yes–it was fun.  How much fun?  This much fun:

My girl likes to party all the time, party all the time!

We were discussing the origins of the Port Huron Statement...or we were just being a couple of G6's. Can't really recall...

Thanks to Romualdo Ancona for the photos.  You may notice my cummerbund and–perhaps–what may look to be a tuxedo.  So, why I am I wearing one?  Again..this will have to remain a mystery for now.  Sorry for all the secrecy, but we are working on a bunch of things simultaneously, and  I don’t wanna jump the gun on anything.  But all should be clear soon I hope.

Anywho, thats it.  Back to the studio tomorrow to tackle “QBeats”.  Please don’t forget to check out “A Very Triggers Christmas” on itunes and spread the word.  It makes a GREAT holiday gift….wink wink.  Hope all is well back home.  We’ll be in the studio for another 10 days and then we’ll make our way back east.  We’ve been offered a few shows to play on the way back–and we might accept them.  But have been working very hard and don’t want to try to squeeze too much in on our way back home.  Until then, friends and loved-ones, keep fighting the good fight.  As you can tell from those photos above, I sure as hell am.

xoxo

-B

xoxo

-B

Posting today’s update live from the studio.  Right now, “Sex Ramp” is playing through the monitors and its starting to sound like an actual song. Debating percussion at the moment…

In the past few days we’ve worked on “Yer Bones”, “Mr. Zane”, and “Sex Ramp”.  We got a new mic for vocals that we’re pretty pumped about.  And, on “Yer Bones” I got to rock my Omnichord:

We had a pretty long day and late night last night, and Woody got up early this morning to do some Protools stuff so everyone needs a little pickup.  Woody, however, regrets his choice:

"This sh** tastes like strawberry Budweiser! Uggh..."

Here are some other pick-me-ups we have lying around the room:

Grapefruit deliciousness

The odd couple.

Last night I saw “Gomorrah” on Netflix and liked it very much.  I’m usually a pretty picky critic so the fact that I liked it surprised even me.

Finally, we should be making an announcement VERY soon (like…soon) about something else we’ve been working on.  Here is a little preview:

I hear rumors of snow happening in the burgh. I hate to admit it, but I even miss the snow…

Stay warm.

xoxo

-B

Virtually every morning when I walk to the shower from my couch, I hear the “Tamale Man” calling outside.  The aptly-named “Tamale Man” sells–you guessed it–homemade tamales out of the trunk of his car.  And, according to multiple trusted sources, these tamales are absolutely delicious.  So I began to think about how this man–a staple of this particular corner of the neighborhood–could never be found anywhere in my neighborhood back home.  Because of this, he’ll be added to my mental ‘plus’ column in my running ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ judgment column that I keep for each city in which I travel.

What this means is that months from now, when I am sitting in someone’s dingy living room at a party in Pittsburgh, and a person asks me whether or not “I like LA” because he/she has never been there, the “Tamale Man” will be carefully extracted from my memory banks and used as an example of some “great things about LA” or some other such nonsense which I will undoubtedly spout.

Of course, this IS complete nonsense.  I obviously have a very, VERY small sampling of an entire city from which to choose in order to make a judgment about that city.  And, my own particular experience over a minute amount of time is completely unsuitable to make sweeping statements about how much this city–or any place for that matter–is “amazing”, “boring”, or “sucks” etc.  Yet I do this very thing constantly.

Over Thanksgiving dinner, in fact, I told mildly amusing anecdotes about the city of Buffalo NY and how little there is to do in that town.  At which point one of my hosts asked a guest who is originally from Japan, “which is the most boring city in Japan”?  She too had no hesitation when answering the question.  Now, I’ll only speak for myself when I say that my impression (and subsequent judgment) of Buffalo–a city with probably over 200,000 people in it–was based on roughly 6 or 7 shows I’ve ever played there.  And, although I would never presume to put words into my fellow dinner guest’s mouth, I do wonder if her impression of the “most boring city in Japan” was drawn from more than a handful of days’ experience there as well?

With this in mind, I thought about the “Tamale Man”.  Here is a man who has no idea that he will be used to represent 9 million other people in LA county by a drunken stranger sitting in another drunken stranger’s living room in Lawrenceville PA at 3AM.    This gentleman is probably making tamales every morning, selling them out of the trunk of his car, and could care less whether or not he is used as a reference point by which others plumb the depths of their self-worth.  Because at the end of the day, I suspect my own eagerness to categorize the people and places in other cities stems from some sort of struggle to reinforce or refute where I believe my place is in the “big picture” of things.  And, perhaps by keeping ridiculous tallies of which places are “cool” and which places (and by implicit extension, the people in these places) “suck”, I really am just trying to reinforce which parts of the culture I value and which parts I choose to reject?

I do know that when I return home from this particular West Coast trip, I am going to be more mindful of how I answer questions similar to the one posed hypothetically above.  I will make a conscious effort to answer that my experience was limited in scope and time while simultaneously trying to keep my clumsy attempts at identity affirmation at bay.

And tomorrow morning, I am going to try one of these goddamn tamales I keep hearing about.

xoxo

-B