Tonight will be my first night in the studio, recording with Brandon Wilde, making “Two People Made This Mess” a reality! I spent the morning writing out the BPMs from the demos to give us a guiding light through the first session (for click-track purposes) — most likely, we’re gonna do a bunch of live…
To say yesterday’s show was a commercial failure would not be an understatement, but I did get to have a nice drunken conversation with a dude I met when he was 22, who is now moving and shaking in Pittsburgh pretty well. We’re going to plan some shows soon — more on that as it…
It’s about time for me to start working on a new album, and I’m already in full swing! A side-gig for a website last year afforded me a really nice tube mic and some gear, so I’m going to take another shot at home recording, with Dead Pressed Flowers’ old helmsman, Ryan Miller, trying out…
For those of you wondering why you haven’t gotten your mail-order copies yet, the time table has shifted slightly. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a while, you can catch yourself in the middle of a mistake, as I did this time around. I was coming very close to putting out a version I…
It’s been forever since I posted here, and I’m gonna work on that, but for now, let’s get to the business at hand. At this point, we have a big picture in frame where the album is concerned — this is, by far, the most well-planned project I’ve ever done, with Mark and I constantly…
….So you’ve all heard “Jerk” by now — it has a driving four-on-the-floor rhythm, which lends itself to an implied drum part. I was on the way to the studio a few weeks ago and was listening to Elvis Costello’s “Get Happy,” and thinking about how much I love “King Horse,” a song that I…
It needs to be said that I’m still buzzing off of the success of my TRAF set, partly because you can YouTube the living hell out of it! Thanks to David Oleniacz for: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRKL0J0LlBE&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0] I think my favorite thing is the two crotchety guys who full-on have a conversation about which way to go…
I had an idea for a transition, and I shared it with Mark at the top of the session yesterday, so we started on “Wonderful Lie,” a newer song about stuff that happened a year-and-a-half ago. Some subjects just stay with you, which is fine, as long as they stay catchy. “Lie” is probably my…
Going out to Mark’s studio this past Wednesday, I had, for the first time in a while, this amazing Zen-like feeling that everything was where it should be in my life. I mean, let’s not even get into my dating situation — that’s always a mistake, and no one should ever ask how that’s going,…
The first day in the studio with a producer like Mark is all about pre-production. The two of you sit across from each other and talk about your music. You play him a song, he listens to it beginning to end and makes notes about how to make it flow better, trim excess time, tighten…