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.

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.

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.

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. At the time, I was going through some medical bullshit and Adam would come over with an 8-track ADAT and record in my crappy Easthampton apartment. It’s funny to think that, while Adam was concurrently working hard to develop the metal band that would ultimately launch his successful music career, he was also writing sappy folk songs on acoustic guitar and recording my mellow piano stuff. One song in particular we wound up recording at Zing Studio in Westfield, which is where I met Joel Stroetzel for the first time– he was hanging out with Adam and at Zing a lot.

Fast forward a number of years, and it turns out that Joel played guitar on Mark’s last record, The Killing Card, and the two of them are good friends. Joel and his wife lived in my former apartment in Easthampton after I moved out.

You have to love Western Massachusetts. It’s like we have our own version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. And, in fact, anyone who has ever played the Iron Horse or knows someone who has is separated only by only a few degrees from Kevin Bacon, since The Bacon Brothers have been booked there on numerous occasions.

Anyway, like Adam D. or Joel or Matt Bachand from Shadows Fall, it’s fitting that Mark Schwaber is one of those people who loves metal but can also tear your heart out with a simple sweet quiet melody. I think it’s this dichotomy that keeps things interesting in Mark’s music, and I am genuinely excited to hear him and Sara together on Friday night at The Black Moon.