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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Greg and I took some pictures of the goingson…

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”.

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

[See post to listen to audio]

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