Day 4-6/10/08

J- Ahhhh yes, amigos, this house is definitely haunted. Two nights ago while we were sleeping a lamp turned on around 3am for no reason! In a confused, sleepy haze I looked for a timer on the outlet or some sort of other palpable explanation to let me rest peacefully but none appeared. I unplugged it and prayed that it would not turn on again! Someone or something keeps detuning my guitars, I mean like whole steps down minutes after I have tuned them. Doors and closets open at random...freaky. IF this place is walked by the stirring souls of the deceased, then I hope they are first off, relatively peaceful, but not like Casper the sissy ghost (you're a ghost, dammit, have some dignity and carry yourself with an element of spooky-ness). And secondly, I hope they have no desire whatsoever in recording equipment of any kind! Please leave the machines alone. The equipment gremlins have that covered.

Oh, yeah, recording...Things are going well; we are on schedule...ok...slightly behind schedule! But, c'mon, what self-respecting band would actually keep a schedule? We recorded two more songs today, Hurricane, an up-tempo rocker that will shock some of you gloom and doom fans. Despite the title, nothing gets ravished except your ears from the non-stop rockin' good vibration (I will stop now). On the real, it' a good song that will juxtapose (I'm on the big-English-words kick today...Look them up, they're used correctly. Ha!) the more mellow, pensive tunes. Scott laid down a cool, chugga-chugga guitar; you'll see what I mean.

We then had a late night session to record Who Goes First?, a cover song I reworked. It's a Ned's Atomic Dustbin original from their 1992-3(?) album Are You Normal?, and it's always been a personal favorite. N.A.D. was an early '90s alterna-rock band from the UK. Highly underrated, in my opinion. When we started to track the song, we hit our first speed bump: the drums were recorded at too fast a tempo. I immediately began to come up with alternatives for recording the song, and all the while Scott was Pro-Tooling away and managed to slow down the drum tempo without shifting the pitch. Technology!!! The rest of the recording was rather painless with most of the tracks completed in 2 or 3 takes. Laura continues he one-take wonderfulness, which I want to chalk up to luck, but she really is that awesome. Of course we recorded by candlelight to keep the equipment gremlins at bay (stay at bay you little buggers!). We ended up the last listen-back around 1:30am and then relegated ourselves to watching one more episode of Flight of the Concords. Scott brought down a bunch of these on DVD, and they have been a hilarious way to blow off steam.

So tomorrow we plan to tackle THREE songs to get back on schedule. If it works out, it works out, if not then we stay behind schedule and work 'till the work is done. All of this to provide you with our simple sketch.