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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.