6:30pm. Friday the 13th.

Mixing so far has been great. It's like Christmas everyday: we head over to the studio where Ryan has been tweaking, effecting, and riding the volumes on our precious track. We show up for a couple hours, make some suggestions, try a few new ideas and leave with one more piece to the puzzle of our record. Yesterday was Friday was the 13th, the day that we finished "Bloody Mary" a song that has been through some big changes this year.

This one needed a little more care and attention to finish than the first two. It sounded good when we arrived, but not there yet. Ryan added some Who-esque piano chords that needed to be tucked into the mix a bit at first. We also spent some time finessing the "atmosphere bridge" that precedes the solo. This section is a bed of tribal drums with a mix of sitar, piano notes, crowd noise, Perk's talking drum, and thunder sheet. There were so many details in this section and we needed to go through a cherry pick the special moments to highlight. Once we were done, we knew it.

In the mixing studio, you play the song on different sets of speakers to make sure it will sound cool on whatever a listener might have. The main ones are Yamaha NS10's - the standard studio speaker. There are the larger Genelecs. There is also Ryan's small boom box to check out how low-fi speakers will sound. The most fun part (I think for all of us) are using what Ryan calls "Flamethrowers". These are the gigantic 4x3 foot speakers mounted directly into the back wall of the studio. They sound like aliens landing. Or atomic weaponry. Or God. That's always a really good moment, when the mix seems pretty much finished and Ryan kicks on the Flamethrowers. It's hard not to smile when you hear something that you've been working on for a year blasting out of a first-class studio loud enough to shift the plates in the Earth.

"Mary" sounded pretty profound and once the work was done, we went next door and ate some raw fish.

In the middle of the night it started to rain.

she's the queen of midnight runs
the cell phone and the rolled up ones
desperate don't despair
call and Mary's there