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.

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…