Monday Day 5:

Today’s main job is to listen to everything we’ve done so far since October, and make a list of what is left to work on. This was a much bigger job that I had originally thought, we were at it for a few hours. We listened to different versions of songs, isolated parts, discussed what we liked and didn’t, and came away with a master checklist of what needs to be done in the next 3 weeks.

After that, we got into the rest of Dave’s “Awake” guitar tracks. In rehearsal, he has been playing a cool wah wah part on the last chorus. Once this part was laid down, as is the case with a lot of stuff in the studio, it wasn’t sitting as well in the track as we thought it would. Dave went on a “part search” for a while. It’s funny to listen to this process. He’ll give the part pass after pass, wringing crazy, violent, wild screaming out of his guitar that a lesser guitar player would sell his soul to the devil to be able to play, and after each one, Dave would say simply: “that sucked”. That’s what makes him Dave; when something really excites him, it is something truly exciting. At one point, I downloaded a picture from “Apocalypse Now” of the gunboat cruising into Martlon Brando’s insane outpost at the end of a Vietnam river for inspiration. This song’s content is based around human aggression, and a young man’s growing distrust of the powers that wage war. I feel that Dave’s guitar part is the last stab of insanity and violence that the song needs to peak. The pic wasn’t quite enough inspiration apparently , so we broke for dinner and left it for later.

Speaking of dinner, for some reason, the Indian restaurant we normally order from apparently hates us. The food was spicy to the point of being physically painful. I tried to keep eating, out of sheer necessity, to stave off my hunger and keep me moving for the recording, but at every bite I found myself more and more yearning for my own death. It didn’t come, and eventually the sweat and stomach pains ended and I could concentrate on our work. Dave, a spice masochist, ate every bite without one drink of water, and seemed to enjoy it. If I wasn’t suffering from internal bleeding, I would have been impressed.

Dave left after dinner and I got to work on vocals. Brian and I have gotten the tracking vocal process pretty worked out. I used to stress about vocal day, and feel that all the planets had to be aligned because I was laying down THE ONE VERSION. I now see tracking vocals as a continuing process and that has made things go much smoother. Last night’s job was just to sing all 3 new songs down 4-5 times each, and get enough for Brian to make some “comped” versions together. Tom turned down the main room lights, lit a bunch of candles, and I sang. We finished up around midnight.

Tuesday, Day 6:

Rainstorm. Big time. Got to the studio just as Dave was getting guitars started on “Blue Bruises”. This track we are giving extra attention to get the guitar tones tasty and right. We re-did almost all of Dave’s guitars and got some really cool, haunting, reverb soaked sounds. For a while the action slowed as Marc Vangool went on an Apocalypse Now-esqe hunt down the dark and lonely river of tone all by himself. He finally conjured up the perfect concoction for Dave’s part, and he laid it down. Like a diamond bullet.

I got on vocals around 8pm, and gave “Blue Bruises” and “Awake” some more love. Got some good “Bruises” passes, then did “Awake” until I had to stop. I was singing it way too hard and got a really bad headache. I don’t know why, maybe I was not breathing right, maybe I had the cans (headphones) up way too loud, but I felt like my head was going to explode after a few passes. It worked out ok, cause Brian needed some time to comp together what I’d done. I went home and slept for 12 hours.

Wednesday Day 7:

Dave spent the afternoon getting the solo to “Blue Bruises”. I got in around 6pm and warmed up and got to singing. Gave “Bruises” another couple passes. The benefit of trying songs multiple times, is that every day, something is bound to be different. Pitch, passion, looseness, even spontaneous new lyrics, you never know. Tonight turned out to have the choruses come out stronger than before. After Brian comped it together, I “doubled” the chorus. Next we worked on the choruses to “Teahouse of the Spirits”. This chorus has no lyrics, it’s all just open sung notes. The idea is to make a lush, majestic world of multitracked harmonies here. Brian and I have to do some experimenting to get the right approach together. We laid down some leads, some high harmonies, some gravelly low ones, and a simple melody over the last “D” to “B” change. We will see how this all sits over the next few days. This is a unique challenge, to have a lyric-less chorus open up a whole world, just musically. How this will work live on stage, we’ll have to see …;) At the moment, it sounds pretty mighty. Got out around 1:30am.

Thursday Day 8:

“Blue Bruises” is starting to sound really, really good. Dave came up to me while we were listening to it and said “can you believe that you wanted to scrap this song?? … what an asshole!!!”. He’s right, now it seems crazy to think that we wouldn’t record this song. I was just afraid we wouldn’t have enough jam room time to get it arranged before tracking it. It all played out just fine, it seems. Dave spent some time on a crazy guitars sound to go over the main riff in "Left To Lose" it sounds like rusty metal scraping against a microphone. Works great.