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.

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.

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.

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.

Northernly was a band I was very involved in during 2005 and 2006 with Aric Bieganek and Rebekah Dutkiewicz. We played a large number of house concerts and at venues all over the northeast, and a ton of songs came out of that timeframe as well.

We got together for a bite at Local Burger in Northampton, then carpooled it up to Conway Rock City. Rebekah, Aric and I hadn’t played music together in almost a year, but you’d never know it listening to the two songs we worked on: Pulverized and Fourth Floor. Aric tracked drums and glockenspiel and Rebekah did some cello parts that sound fantastic. I’m sure the future Northernly incarnation sessions will yield similiarly great results.

For night number three, Greg and I headed up to Conway Rock City after a brief stop at Bueno Y Sano in Northampton for a quick bite. I recorded some scratch piano and vocals for all three songs we worked on this week: Committed To Tape, Storm Of The Century, and Mirror. Greg added some kick ass guitar parts. That along with Dave and Greg’s bass playing makes the songs sound fantastic.

Actually, none of these songs have any arrangements for acoustic guitars yet, only electric.  The result is a a bigger rock sound than I’ve had on previous recordings, which I’m pretty jazzed about.

It was a beautiful day to head up to Conway Rock City for our second night of recording. Greg, Steve and I recorded some drums for Mirror after a bunch of takes. It’s a waltzy little number that I wrote many years ago. Greg saw Steve and I perform it way back when we were doing Smokejumpers shows, and now he’s playing on it. Fun times. Steve, Greg, and Dave Chalfant worked out some fantastic bass parts for Committed To Tape and Storm Of The Century, I sang a scratch vocal for Committed To Tape, and Greg added some guitar shit too. Oh, and we even had time to rehearse Kindred a bit. All in all it was a really productive evening.

Greg and I took some pictures of the goingson…

Our first night up in Conway Rock City! Myself, Greg Saulmon, and Steve Biegner got a really good start on two songs: Committed To Tape and Storm Of The Century. We head back up to Dave Chalfant’s studio again this evening.

Kristen Beam was nice enough to come up and take some pictures:

photo by Kristen Beam

Tonight I’m heading up to Sackamusic in Conway, MA to start recording with Dave Chalfant. I’m taking Steve Biegner and Greg Saulmon and we’re going to be working on a few songs. It marks the first real (not reel) recording for the forthcoming album.

It somehow seems fitting to be starting this a day after my birthday and opening yet another new chapter in my crazy life. In a phone call yesterday, my dad and I discussed whether or not I thought I was “cured”. I told him I try not to think about it, which is true. Actually, I probably won’t ever be able to answer this question. This fact tends to insert itself into almost every one of my songs in one way or another.

It’s been about 8 or 9 years since I made the last record. I am reminded of how I got to this point, and if I pile up all those circumstances it’s a little overwhelming. But with that, it’s exhilerating too.

I intend to have a lot of fun. To use a Massachusettsism, I’m “wicked excited”.

Last week I had the pleasure of getting together with Mark Schwaber, who looks like he’ll be playing some stuff on some songs (Flowers On The Fire Escape, Fight Or Flight, Other States). He  brought a lot of ideas to the table. It was refreshing to hear these songs in a new light. We’re getting together again this evening, along with Greg Saulmon whose guitar stylings will be surely welcome. Greg has played along with me for my last couple of shows.

It’s been great for me to think about working with a  bunch of different musicians. One of the challenges, however (for them, mostly), is that I don’t really have many demos of most of my songs. So I setup the dining room last night and recorded a couple tunes so I can pass them around and see if anyone wants to play on them. Also it was my first foray into Garageband recording so I wanted to see if I could act like I knew what I was doing. I used some pretty shitty mics and mic stands and the cats were running around, so I did a few takes.

The Gatekeeper is a song I wrote last week. Not sure if it’ll be on the album, but here it is. I recorded this live while singing along to what I was playing.

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Fourth Floor is a Northernly song I’m hoping to convince Aric Bieganek and Rebekah Dutkiewicz to record with me. I recorded the piano track first, then put down the vocal track.

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You can read all about the process of starting the new record here.

When Ethan visited Western Mass. back in October, we spent a couple of days recording two short songs and one not as short song…

You Were A Cynic (1:56)

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Other States (1:12) with Ethan on melodica

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Fight Or Flight (3:14)

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The new State Shirt cd, This Is Old was released just last month. Ethan has been busy promoting that and also scheming up some shows for himself. He and I are trying to get some sort of Matthew Larsen / State Shirt / ??? tour happening in late Spring…

This Friday, I have the opportunity to open for Western Massachusetts singer/songwriter, Mark Schwaber. I’ve known Mark for a long time now as most musicians in the valley do, having common friends and acquaintances. Mark writes a great music blog called Feedback for MassLive (where I work), he ran Night Owl Records in Easthampton where I purchased many a cd, and over the twenty or some odd years we’ve both been making music in the valley, we’ve been on the same bill a few times and attended many of the same shows. Aside from my normal appreciation that Mark is a ‘valley musician’, I can honestly say that Mark Schwaber is one of my favorite musicians anywhere. There are some of his songs that just absolutely floor me every time I hear them… ‘Dignity in Death’ for example.

Mark has been performing with Sara Gomes lately, and from what I hear, it’s nothing short of magic. Sara Gomes is the wife of Tom Gomes, who who used to play drums in a band called Killswitch Engage (and now owns his own drum company). The main guitar dudes in Killswitch are Adam Dutkiewicz and Joel Stroetzel.

Adam and I got together when Killswitch was still in its infancy to record the Smokejumpers album. (more…)