This afternoon on the way to the diner for my breakfast, I locked my front door and turned around. Looking at the ground, I saw thousands of little dark droplet marks. RAIN!!! Woo Hoo! I couldn’t have asked for more. Dave and Stephen have a Tsunami benefit Camp Freddy show at Anaheim Pond tomorrow night, and Chris is out of town, so today and tomorrow are all on me. Having the rain to make atmosphere is a wonderful bit of luck. I sure hope it lasts.

There are plenty of rhythm guitar tracks and vocals for me to do, and just getting to hash out ideas and brainstorm with only Gummo there is kinda nice. After all the effort and trials of yesterday, a quiet studio is a nice change.

She Won’t Last:
We got my 2nd verse guitars with the Les Paul going through the Matchless. For the 1st verse, which is really spacious and the part of the song that we are experimenting the most on, we tried some different ideas…

Gummo used the Vox Tonelab to get a Smiths “How Soon is Now” kind of effect. Again I played the Les Paul, this time through the Mesa Recto. I love how this part turned out. The effect is really subtle, but you can feel it. We are trying to add some elements of tension that build up into the chorus, that aren’t “live” parts, but more subliminal, or “felt” parts. We tracked me getting some wicked loud feedback in the main room standing in front of the Marshall cabinet for one element. I also played a big loud piano chord that Gummo plays backwards in the mix. The effect is this really cinematic slow build that rises and rises, then BAM! – the chorus. It’s too early to see how all these parts will finally assimilate, but we have them recorded, and we’ll sort them out in the coming days.

Finally, we added a new guitar melody to the choruses that is my new favorite part. We used a red pedal called a "Whammy" that is apparently a Tom Morello/Radiohead fixture. It made a ridiculous amount of really diverse effects, and we settled on one that pulled the melody out from the wall of Dave's and my guitars that had been laid down. Dave also used this pedal on "The Loophole" during our last sessions. This band guitar-wise is all about Dave, and that is wonderful, but when I can come up with a part that I am proud of and think helps the song along, I get a kick out of it.

I keep seeing Rivers Cuomo in the hallway, they are working on the new Weezer record right across the hall. I can hear a song faintly through the walls.

Dave, Riss & Perk came by around 10pm to talk a little business. I know that it's all necessary, but this week the realization really started hitting home, that our band that we have been having so much fun with is now something to seriously work on and manage. It's not a good thing, and it's not a bad thing, it's just reality. After the meeting I went back in and got to work on the "Go On" vocals.

Glen darkened up the main tracking room, and lit some candles. I went out in the dark and sang the song for about an hour. Again I did the hand held mic thing, but this time used a larger, more substantial one. Since we have been watching "Some Kind of Monster" all week during dinner breaks, we now call this mic "The Hetfield Mic". Looks like this one might be a nice balance between sound quality and my new found enjoyment with tracking vocals with a hand held mic. We worked until around midnight, and Gummo stayed for a while to "comp" the vocals. Also a by-product of the Metallica movie, Gummo has somewhat perfected an impersonation of Lars Ulrich's Gandalf-like father and is dealing out comments like "I really, really don't think that is a good idea", and "delete that", while tracking. It seems that SKOM dialogue is the new "Spinal Tap" for endlessly repeatable studio soundbites.

Today Dave posted the live video of our first performance of "Said You'd Be" shot a few weeks ago at the showcase. The audio is rough, sadly all that came through on the DAT are a bit of drums and way too much vocal - but we thought we'd post it for you anyway, cause Marc and Jamie did such a good job filming it. The song has changed a bit since then. We added another chorus after the solo so it doesn't end so quickly (Mortisha8 should like that). When we wrote the song we were all excited to kick one out that was all energy, no big changes, no slowing down. It ended up being tremenously fun to play, but only just over two minutes. We thought we'd keep it going just a touch longer by addding the chorus. The lyrics changed a bit too. In the comments at 6767.com, some people were comparing my singing to Klaus from The Scorpions. That, I can say is something I never thought I would ever hear.