Using a laptop to record some extra elements in various locations has been really fun. Tuesday evening, Greg, Steve, and I decided to give this a shot over at Greg’s place in downtown Holyoke. Greg’s place is great… A nice loft with lovely views of the awesome buildings in Holyoke. I really love my city.

So after some delicious mole, pupusas, and pork burritos at El Guanaco in South Hadley Falls, Steve, Greg, and I headed to Greg’s to put some finishing touches on The Spires. Steve had to download the driver for the Tascam US-144 interface we’re using, but we were up and running in no time.

Down the street at city hall, a chicken ordinance was being debated. There was quite a turnout! Parking on the street was a little busy.

The other thing that was happening was a lively service at the recent storefront church that opened down the street. What was great was that Greg’s amp was picking up some of the signal from it (maybe they had a wireless mic?). The person giving the sermon in Spanish can actually be heard towards the tail end of Greg’s guitar track on The Spires. It’s awesome.

I am getting really excited to start promoting the record, and am pleased to tell you that I’ve decided on a title!

More about that soon.

I recently got together with my bandmate from my Northernly days, Rebekah Dutkiewicz, so she could add some cello parts. The portable laptop rig situation we threw together worked out pretty well.

Rebekah lives in a cool lofty apartment in downtown Easthampton with Jack Brown, rhythm guitar player for the excellent jazz ensemble, Swing Caravan. They have two adorable dogs, Sam the beagle and Pepper the dachshund. They also live nearby Riff’s Joint, which is where Rebekah and I got some delicious burgers for eating.

We setup a borrowed MacBook and a little Tascam interface and Rebekah recorded a bunch of cello parts for Mirror. It is going to sound amazing when it’s mixed all together!

I took the day off from being chained to my cubicle in the MassLive.com office and headed up to Conway Rock City by myself to get together with Mr. Dave Chalfant. It was kind of a marathon day of tweaks and little things added to a bunch of songs.

Dave added bass to Little Black Boxes and I added a percussion part– a mallet on a tom basically. That song sounds spooky now, I love it. Dave also added some rocking bass to Pulverized and an in-your-face fuzzy bass part to The Spires which sounds amazing. We spent the remainder of the time listening and making some notes for mixing.

Really hoping to wrap all this up by the end of the summer, for either an August or October release. Why not September you may ask? It’s because I’m going to ITALY with the wife.

Got together with Greg Saulmon in his swanky downtown Holyoke loft to listen to the record all the way through. Back on Friday, March 12th, my cousin Steve went up to Sackamusic without me to add some acoustic guitar, tambourine, snare drum, and chorusy vocals to The Spires.

Between Greg moving to Holyoke, my grandmother’s death and a wedding to go to, the month slipped by with not much thought given to the album. It was nice to get together with Greg again and take stock of what we had. We shared thoughts about the cohesiveness of the album and schemed up a couple guitar parts to be added. Despite being worried that everything had become so stalled, the record is sounding great as a whole, and I think we got the sequence pretty much nailed down.

The record is likely going to start with Fourth Floor.

Whether you celebrate President’s Day, Presidents’ Day, or President’s Day, for me it was a day off from my day job and an opportunity to head up to Conway to do some more work on my forthcoming record. Dave Chalfant and I worked on adding new elements to a few songs that I recorded as Dining Room Demos, and he added some bass parts to Fourth Floor.

It was fun times.

Fourth Floor is sounding particularly amazing since its been graced with fantastic musicians adding their stamp to it. I mean, just look at this:

Me – Piano and Lead Voice
Aric Bieganek – Drums, Glockenspiel, Background Voice
Rebekah Dutkiewicz – Cello, Background Voice
Matthew Carefully – Banjo, Mandolin, Background Voice
Dave Chalfant – Bass

I’ll be posting a track from my upcoming record sometime soon… maybe this one. Also I may have a name for this thing. More about that later.

In 2005, I faced some serious decisions regarding treatment after learning that my Hodgkin’s Lymphoma had come back. It was hard to know what to do, because whichever option I chose came with some consequences. Ultimately I chose to undergo a stem cell transplant, which was a nasty affair with a tremendous affect on my emotional state as well as my body. Now a few years later and cancer free, this song seems to have creeped into my consciousness again. I decided to finally record a demo version this past Monday.

Along with the piano and voice parts, I recorded some background melodica and some kazoo parts reverb-ified.

Listen to “Happens In Stages”

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Happens in stages
Dog-eared pages
Two roads at your feet

Heaven and Earth
Or what it’s worth
You could take chances or time

Also recorded on Monday was a song called Little Black Boxes, inspired by The American Widow Project.

Inspired by The American Widow Project, I wrote lyrics to this song around Veteran’s Day in November of 2009 after this story on NPR caught my attention. The melody came a little bit later, and actually over time I wound up stripping down some of the other parts to keep this more straightforward.

Listen to “Little Black Boxes”

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Little black boxes
Stacks of letters I sent
White car in the driveway
Two men and a flag
Within “The Days Ahead”

And I try to smell him
But they washed all his clothes
And sealed them in plastic
In little black boxes
Within “The Days Ahead”

* “The Days Ahead” is the name of the 3 ring binder the U.S. Military gives to widows. The American Widow Project is on Twitter @americanwp

Nearly hurricane-strength winds and heavy rain and fog couldn’t keep me from heading up to Conway Rock City to work on a couple songs for the new record.  I sang some vocals on Fight or Flight and The Spires and did some organ tracks also. And of course, like a good New Englander, I had a “how about this crazy weather” discussion with Dave.

It was some of the weirdest weather we’ve experienced in awhile around here. By most accounts, it felt like a late summer storm, except we’re in the heart of winter. Driving up to Conway in the dense fog was a little challenging, since Sackamusic is in the middle of the woods on narrow country roads.

I’m looking forward to heading back up to the studio again really soon. Working with Dave Chalfant has been a great experience.

Oh! – We were doing some brainstorming, and I think I may wind up using some components of “Salt”, the ‘prepared piano’ song I recently recorded last week. Really excited.

While setting up some mics with the piano lid open, I accidentally dropped the end of the mic cable on the soundboard. It wound up being the inspiration for this song.

I used a carpenter’s hammer against one of the bass strings, then plucked the upper melody with my fingers. The sustain pedal has to be held down, of course. Then I put some water in a wine glass and clanked it with a paint stirrer… and then of course there were tambourines and egg shakers… and then the singing of four part harmonies.

Listen to “Salt”

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When all the walls that you had built
Could not protect you from the guilt
The secrets hid behind the eyes
Were darker than your safest lies

And when they come, they pull you down
They crush the peace you thought you’d found

But we’re deciding who’s at fault
We stand the breeze and taste the salt
We’re deciding who’s at fault
We stand the breeze and taste the salt

This past Friday, my old friend Ethan Tufts was in town. After having some good lunch at Local Burger in Northampton, we headed up to Sackamusic in Conway Rock City. Ethan added some great guitar parts to Fourth Floor and Pulverized.

Me, Ethan, and our friend Bill Belina started our first band back in 1989 when we were in middle school. All we had at the time were two keyboards and drums. I aspired to be the next ‘guy from Tears For Fears’ or maybe Phil Collins with a mullet. We played music in Bill’s dad’s basement, which was lined with polka records and wood paneling. We wrote tons of songs and learned how to be a band. Gradually Bill and Ethan learned other instruments and I learned how to play keys. A couple decades have gone by, and we’ve all played in various bands, grew up, etc.

Now Ethan lives in Los Angeles, has a record label, and makes awesome music asState Shirt. He manages to come home a few times a year to visit with family and friends, and we seem to get together and collaborate on music things all these years later. It’s nice to have him be a part of this record.

Yesterday I drove up to Sackamusic in Conway to spend some time taking some inventory of the songs I’ve recorded so far for the upcoming record. I’m happy to report that things are sounding like they’re really coming together!

I recorded new lead vocal tracks for Mirror and Fourth Floor, and Dave added some bass to Mirror. I tried a vocal track for The Gatekeeper also, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for. I’m trying hard to capture the magic of the original live demo I made in my dining room. Maybe I should just use that version on the record. We’ll see.

I didn’t bring a camera with me, but here are some pictures I took with my cell:

So after the end of June, I decided to take a little break from recording and sit with the songs for a little while. Kristen and I went on vacation to Provincetown, Massachusetts for the first week of July, which was much needed.  I was hoping to get back to music soon after, but the remainder of July and August was spent doing some renovations to the downstairs apartment in our building in order for us to be able to rent it out to our next tenant.

Then, at the end of August, my appendix ruptured while we were visiting with Kristen’s family in Pennsylvania. I needed emergency surgery and wound up spending a week at Hershey Medical Center. When I got home, I had some complications with my incision that weren’t so great. Needless to say it required me taking it easy, because abdomen surgery kinda hurts I discovered. I was out of work for about 5-6 weeks… So here we are the first week in November and I’m able to finally get back to the music, which is what I love to do.

I headed up to Conway Rock City in the afternoon, and Dave Chalfant and I snaked wires out a window, through the garage, and into the main house where his beautiful Baldwin upright piano lives. I recorded a few songs: The Spires, The Gatekeeper, and Whatever Happened. Later, Greg Saulmon and Mark Schwaber came up to record some guitar and drum parts for The Spires. That song in particular is sounding amazing.

I took some pictures with my cell phone of the setup madness. I also had an old Canon film camera with me and snapped some photes, but I haven’t gotten those pictures developed yet.

Well, I love a rainy night. Especially when there is music-making going on. Last night I picked up Greg Saulmon and Mark Schwaber in Easthampton. After a stop at Local Burger for a quick meal, we headed up to Sackamusic in Conway, MA in order to Schwaberize and Saulmonize two songs, Flowers On The Fire Escape and Fight Or Flight.

I recorded a scratch piano track and some vocals. Then for Flowers On The Fire Escape, Greg added some pretty eerie guitars and Mark added some harmony melody guitar too. For Fight or Flight, they both worked out various guitar parts, culminating with a wall-of-sound noisy guitar finish that blew me away. Greg wound up using a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale for part of the scratchy slide guitar stuff. Mark also played bass on both tunes.

I’m taking a little break for the next couple weeks while I celebrate my wedding anniversary, head to Cape Cod for a week’s vacation, and sit with these songs for awhile to come up with vocal arrangements.

The second session with my Northernly bandmates, Rebekah Dutkiewicz and Aric Bieganek, yielded some pretty amazing results. Between Aric’s glockenspiel parts and Rebekah’s multiple layered cello sections, Pulverized and Fourth Floor are sounding downright orchestral. They each even put down some backing vocal tracks, and Aric had some time to do some acoustic guitar things also.

With how grand and crazy the end of Pulverized is sounding, we joked that it was the Layla of the album, but with its darker chord structure, maybe it’s more like the Let It Grow of the album.

Mark Schwaber‘s skill on the guitar is evident by listening to the great records he’s put out. But I didn’t know until recently that Mr. Schwaber is also a spectacular drummer. I had spoken to him earlier this year about making the record, and about how none of these songs had been arranged with drums yet. As someone who is not a drummer, I had few ideas. We got together sometime in March and he worked out some drum parts to Fight Or Flight, Flowers On The Fire Escape, and Other States…. AND THEY SOUND AWESOME.

Mark and I stopped at Antonio’s in Easthampton for a slice of pizza before heading up to Conway Rock City to put down the drum tracks for the three aforementioned songs.

Mr. Dave Chalfant is one class act. He packed up his van full of Nields-era recording equipment and hauled it to my house in Holyoke for session #5. Our mission was to lay down some sweet piano tracks using the Marantz piano in my dining room. In recent years, my wife had it moved up here from her hometown of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, as it was her childhood piano. After the tuning efforts of Sean Mallari, Registered Piano Technician, it’s been sounding great ever since.

We recorded over fake scratch piano tracks with real piano tracks on a bunch of songs: Committed To Tape, Mirror, Storm Of The Century, Fourth Floor, and Pulverized. I also recorded a piano track for The Gatekeeper.