The Rockit Room May 23

Oh bumpy bumpy

Turbulence...as I'm frequently comforted by airline attendants- 'the thing with turbulence that you have to keep in mind is that no matter how rough it is or which way the plane gets pulled, there's nothing to run into'. Well the saying oddly applies just as smoothly to the recent state of recording for the next record. Nothing has been an outright threat to it, but I could do with finding some smoother air…


By May (as in, now) I had planned on being knee deep in final mixing and song selection if not at least immersed in primary tracking and voice overdubbing.

Gnawing my hair? Indeed. As it stands I'm just starting to gather and develop fresh ideas, as well as pour over what was left from just last year. Why stalled on the tar mack? Well...I've got some leads, but maybe I should explain some back story...

I started recording around '92 when I was lent a Tascam Porta1 four track. Though the means of recording have changed over the years, my lust for recording never waned. From the start, recording meant absolutely everything. It was this amazing extension of my love for music and what my favorite records meant to me.
Music meant consolation, escape, love, acceptance- indelibly.

I never started a live band mainly because the kind of music I was recording didn't seem conducive to a live set up. I also had friends in bands and saw all the things that go wrong (ALL of which have happened to us in our first year playing out baha!).

Also, I was always worried that playing live would start to influence what 'sounded good' and influence what got recorded. The great thing about recording is it's the playback that serves as the guiding hand.
I always felt trying too hard to 'listen' for a good melody while your actually playing an instrument can be dangerous because what feels good to 'play' isn't necessarily what feels good to 'hear'.

Playing live also wasn't as crucial as it has become today. There was a time when a great demo could actually land you a recording deal, or at least get you a shot on a solid indie.

So I met Markkus and started playing out. My worst fears were confirmed as many tunes fell flat in the live environment. Some worked only if we played them just a certain way, while others Markkus made possible because of his imaginative drumming.
Jason Mclelland (now of Oceans of Fire) came on as bass/guitar and was the first person to really push us as a live band. He knew how to book shows well and put up the first website. By the end of '05, good friends Maddy & Josh offered to pay for pressing a disk.
Play Dead was done by early the next year & one of the aspects I was so so pleased about was the successful integration of older tunes. Songs from '97 like Hey There & Summerside that meant so much to me for so long could finally be put out along new ones. Pillbox and All to be Undone had been around since '03 while Play Dead (the song) and Color of Destroyed were initially recorded in the winter of '02.
World Class was the last song to be written and recorded for the album.

Here's where things start to fall apart as well as bring us to now...
With 2006 being a blinding whirl wind dealing with a indie radio campaign for the disk, playing shows, promoting shows, & line up changes, for the first time, my daily recording slowed leading to a growing heap of fragmented ideas, the likes of which I don't think I'm even realizing now.
I've always felt so much security in knowing how close I am to what I do musically but for the first time I felt intensely overwhelmed and panicked by this bizarre detachment from demos I had recorded only weeks before.

We recorded and aborted drums sessions in November of last year. We tried again in January. I was also expecting to have a new Mac with updated recording software up and going as to facilitate more tracks at higher fidelity and enable a heavier arsenal of effects/treatments.

March half cooked, failed sessions, gallons of demos to start making sense of, and a delay in the new recorder...
This all sweetly resulted in days of frantic demo rummaging, worrying my back hair gray whilst trouble shooting the computer ending only in drinking myself into oblivion nightly (only to lie awake half the night worrying...)
With the Mac & recording software finally up by April (Protools couldn't make their authorizing protocols any more ass backwards), we went for another go at recording drums.
Voila! The two days tracking drums was done with hardly any difficulty and the relief it provided was... well, a shot of smooth air...
Thanks for the ear. More soon. Call me already..
Dean