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.

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.