notes from the recording studio

Mike and I (this is Todd speaking. . .err, writing) had a great recording session yesterday, despite the fact that I completely overslept and woke up to him knocking on my bedroom window at 12:30 in the afternoon. He walked over to Grand Central Bakery to get some coffee for us, and I got dressed and set up my recording equipment. We finished the vocals on "Two Miles From Home", and then tried various ways to fill some of the empty spaces in the song.

We tried some keyboard parts, but we decided right away that they sounded ridiculous and inappropriate, so I pulled out my guitar and amp and tried some feedback and weirdness instead. That stuff will be great, once it's edited, and chopped, and placed in just the right moments. Mike suggested an ethereal keyboard sound like the one at the beginning of the Elliott Smith song "Angeles", so we listened to that and I said, "Hey, it sounds like when you run your finger around the rim of a wine glass," so we grabbed every different kind of glass I own and spent the next half hour trying every variation we could. We played each one separately, we tried two at a time, and we tried playing multiple glasses at once. We even tried splashing our fingers around in the water in the glasses. We thought we were geniuses until we listened back to the tracks, and cracked up laughing at the results. The water splashing just sounded like someone urinating. It wasn't exactly the ominous soundscape we were hoping for. We scrapped all that stuff, and decided that maybe the song is good as is. Just because there's empty space doesn't mean it has to be filled all the time. Silence is golden, et cetera.



From there, we moved on to "The Perils of Drink," which now has a really good vocal track on it, and is shaping up quite nicely as a pastiche, thanks to Mike's line describing how Orion ran down the street screaming old Beatles songs. I took that idea and ran with it, so we used "We Can Work It Out" (part of which is also a waltz, and is in the same key) as the inspiration for the instrumentation and overall sound of our song. We think you'll love it. FYI, we may be calling up some of you to ask for your help in singing along during the choruses. Just thought I'd put the word out.

After spending time with those songs again, I also have to say that Scotty absolutely ruled on his drum tracks, particularly on "Two Miles From Home." He totally set the tone for the feel of that song, and set the bar high for the rest of us. Hyper-super-ultra-mega kudos to Scotty.

That's the latest from Camp Fenbi about the progress of the recordings. More to come next weekend!