So today discussions of how to market the album. Radio and selling at Tower records methinks. Upon further listening I am increasingly ecstatic. I hope that this will be received well. We'll be having the listening thing tomorrow (thursday) and I'll let you know how that goes.

Grayson and I are watching Nashville, I'm drinking a lot of water.

My brain has plenty of ideas for the next thing/album we're doing. Conner's been foolin around with a pile of drums and I've been fooling around with a pile of crazy (aka my brain) and its all evening out to something spectacular. I'm plum tired.

Artillery

Conner is sleeping on the couch right now. About two minutes ago, we finished our album "Artillery". We'd been at it for several days in a row, going through each song and saying 'oh, the guitar there needs to be punchier' or 'oh crap, I should really re-record these vocals'. Knobs turned and Tyler pacing, that was the scene this night. The album art and booklet notes are pending publication (currently trapped a block away in Vanessa's bag). 

Whenever we are zeroing in on finishing an album its like we're in a fighter jet flying over a warzone territory. With several of the songs we're seeing things like bombed out enemy bases, where we have clearly beaten them and those are targets that we don't have to worry about anymore. "Maraschino Dub" and "I'm not breathing" were like that, we started the song and it didn't take too long to learn them and then I did some overdubs and then it was like 'oh, perfect'. Songs like "Try as I might" and "Wide" we did vocal tracks over and over (Try as I Might took one hundred and thirty one vocal takes) before we were fine with them. Those songs are like hostile enemy headquarters (as we fly over in the jet) that we haven't quite obliteratred,  and so we have to keep on flying over and drop bombs on the survivors before they rebuild the hostile government.

A few seconds ago I woke Conner (from a nightmare involving his truck getting broken into by a wolf) and said 'Conner, make the vocals [in Wide] not sound crappy' and he did. It was marvelous. That's it, that's all that we had left to do. Anyway, I don't want to toot the James Rabbit horn too much, but this is a fine accomplishment for us.

One thing that I'm a bit stressed over is that we have played this album not very much in the band besides Conner and I. With Le Fou, Grayson and Vanessa were very helpful in letting us know what sounded good and what did not sound good. I'm afraid that I'll give this CD to Vanessa and she'll say, 'its good, but the vocals in this song are pretty bad and the drums in this song are too quiet', and I'll be crushed, because I'll have to take back all the copies of the album and re-do that one part in "Radio Waves Lie" or something. Anyway, I'm scared about that. I have this big fear, whenever I listen to my own music that the song will completely fall apart, even though it doesn't, I'm afraid that the Tyler of the past will have messed up something. Anyway, sometimes I fail retroactively, sometimes I'm fine.

I think the listening party is going to be on Thursday, but I have to talk to Dan. I'll let you know how it goes.

Saxophones Cult Following

If you are going to stay up for forty eight hours working on vocal overdubs, two things to avoid are jogging and bike riding, especially if you do not normally do these things. They will result in your legs feeling like iron. Also, eating right is probably important in the equation. I usually get one of the three meals a day right, today I think I did two right (cereal for breakfast, mini pizza for lunch BAD and turkey sandwich and mini tacos for dinner) Pain and malnutrition are only two parts of this wacky equation that is summer 2004, though.

A few of these songs we've convinced ourselves are rather brilliant. The album is sequenced so that, after a couple of underdog lead-ins, the two best singles hit you after each other, and then come the three most structurally experimental songs and then come a bunch of pop runners-up and then come the three nice ending songs. We're going to be hopefully tomorrow fooling around with knobs and making things sound more equal than they are currently.

I'm really excited, both for how the album is going to be recieved and for the fact that we can get started on our next project right quick. We don't particularly have to worry about anything, just start writing songs and so forth and jump right in.

I'm happy right now. I'll keep on watching this re-run of SNL, drink a cup of Kool-Aid maybe, if I get hungry later tonight I'll eat a bowl of Clusters (because God is apparently very fond of me and has gifted me with like ten boxes), but if I don't, I'll just go to sleep and I'll wake up and either finish up the album some more or do some chores or just lounge around and play some Earthbound. I've really been meaning to play some Earthbound.

So, passing out Speed Dogs singles like candy is on the horizon, putting together singles for Cuba and Cactuses maybe after that, getting art all ready and done for all of this, and getting the word out somehow to the brilliant streets, because they know what's going on.

Oh yeah, also the documentary that Sterling is doing, I have no doubt that it will be spectacular. He got so much good footage, that it will be difficult to edit it down to a half hour, but that's a good sign. It shows this really great progression from how a song begins as Conner and I screwing around, to a complete semi-punk opus. I am very eager to see it, as I am sure all of you are.

As far as you being curious about how all this is going to turn out like goes, I'll put up the lyrics at www.geocities.com/jamesrabbit/Artillery Oh yeah, by the way, that's going to be the album's name, Artillery. It was the best powerful thing we could come up with. I mean, we like it a lot. So paranoiass about guitar tone and vocal level aside, we've got a darn good album. Maybe better than any of our others.

Excerpt from notes for overdubs:

"Cuba" - A saucy boat ripe with treasure brimming with glew (?) and sorting it all out for you - clean up - vicarize the keyboard whistles line and chime up the voices.

"Try as I might" - If this song was a cat it would be the cat that everybody all of the people in the family looked at like he had just committed a deadly sin every time he walked in the room - but he is a cat with potential don't you know, Adding vocals and bloop bloop keyboard part again and find some way to fierce up.

"Radio Waves Lie" - Vocals, something special to make me well again in the bridge.

I wrote these on the floor while Conner worked on "I'm not Breathing" which took up an entire page on notes with what I wanted to do to it, and what Conner DID do to it while I sat there and hoped.

Still thinking about the album name and closing in on everything that bothers so far.

Radio Waves Lie, I have no alibi

As we near closer to the completion of this album I am going through the typical personality crises that are amplified around times of accomplishment. It isn't just about 'is this album any good?', its about 'where does this achievement place me in the history of human accomplishment?'. Let's not go into that because then I'll just be here for two hours talking about blah blah depressed and blah blah ecstatic.

Also, I realize that I should probably start marketing or sending out this music to people. I should have started with "Heart of Gold" or earlier. I mean, people will like it, its more accessible (though still as crazy or crazier) than the other albums, but its just a matter of getting it out to their ears. I don't know, I just assume that whatever I hear, everybody else hears, like this strange global shared experience. So when I'm listening to the song "Love Plus One" by Haircut 100 in my head, I am also imagining that if I start singing it in the supermarket the cashier will start singing along.

Tyler- Rain
Cashier - Rain
Tyler - Rain
Cashier - Rain
Tyler - Rain and a
Cashier - Rain and a
Tyler & Cashier - La la Love plus one

Because that song seems like such a milestone of pop music, right? But you don't know it and you haven't heard it. And you don't know James Rabbit's new album and you haven't heard it either? So doesn't make those things the same somehow?

I guarantee there will be a few things on this album  that you haven't heard before. You will be surprised. You may even be pleasantly surprised. I just have a few songs to put lyrics to and two to record rhythm tracks for, but those will be a walk in the park.

I had a dream the other night where I was being surrounded by children who thought I was the new Jesus.  I was in a park babysitting an acoustic guitar of medium quality for Ian and a child circled around me, taking piece by piece of the guitar as he went. Another group of children sat nearby, examining the situation. To escape the responsibility of the guitar and to hide from the increasingly creepy children, I went and hid in a thrift store that was closed (as it was night time), even though a bunch of people were in it. A child helped me pick out some disguise clothes, which were just bigger versions of my older clothes and we left the thrift store.

I drove. I drove from the island that the thrift store was on to dry land. This was a scary manouver, I just remember descending from a rocky protrusion from the ocean onto the road near an industrial district, swerving and stepping on the gas to avoid the closing railroad tracks as the train got ready to come by. Driving back to my house (with the now nonexistent waif) I had to go down a series of staircases in the car and the visual effect was just like in a game like Grand Theft Auto where, if you are driving a car and you change the view, you see things as if your eyes sat between the headlights of the car. As we were going down the staircases, groups of children kept on coming up trying to stop us, in V formations, with the number of children in the phalanx increasing each time, from one to three to five to nine, and so forth.

I knew I couldn't be intercepted by the children, because there was a growing number of them amassing behind me and I knew if they got me they would never let me go. Also, allow me to interrupt myself for a minute. I have this weird dream consciousness where, as the dream is going, I know its a dream mostly but I suspend disbelief enough to really worry about things sometimes. For example, I think if I am trapped somewhere in the dream, I will not be able to wake up from that dream. Eventually we got home and I was sitting on the couch and I saw the sky rippling blue above the television. I went out into the backyard and saw Conner and a hobo sitting around a bonfire. Conner had let the hobo come and live with us and they were just keeping warm.

I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet and the water in the bowl went down and made a broken sound and sputtered and then things started coming out of the bathroom sink. Pepsi bottles. Pepsi bottles and cups formerly housing soda. Grayson was behind it. Nobody had to say anything, I knew Grayson was behind it.

 

To do: Kick Big Fat Pop Fat Butt
 
So yikes, we're almost done with the album. I sat down today to revise my 'to do list' and found myself crossing out a bunch of the less-useful songs that I was struggling to start working on. This lead to a list of the songs that I'm thinking about using on the album, putting the longer songs ("Regime Change" and "Maraschino Dub") at the ends of the 'sides' (because my brain is tuned to vinyl sometimes I think) and then filling in the bits, aiming for less than twenty minutes a side. As I was doing this, I found it very easy to fill in the time, and before you know it, I've got a list of fifteen songs, with twelve of them 70 to 100% finished.
 
The thing that's happening in my brain now is me asking 'is this album better than Le Fou?'. The way Le Fou works for me is that there's two good songs in the beginning and two good songs at the end, and a bunch of really mediocre stuff in the middle. And as experimental as Le Fou and Trauma Season were, the song structures I think are progressing quite well. I mean, let's compare the albums centerpieces:
 
"Goes Wild", the first track on Le Fou is the chords C and G for five minutes. "Regime Change", the seventh track on this album (which does not have yet a name) has nineteen different changes, it accomplishes structurally what "Goes Wild" does lyrically. There's weird rhythms, "Amfad" has the bass and drums playing in different meters, "Wide"'s verses are in eleven and the musical interludes are in a very martial 3. There's a lot of stuff that I'm musically very proud of.
 
Also it sounds better. With Le Fou I was stressing out very much as to how it would sound on different soundsystems (moreso with The Heart that Ate New York, which relied on you hearing ALL of its sparse arrangements), with this one, thanks to a nice mixer and Conner's well-educated fingers on the board, I'm pretty darn confident that it will sound equally grand on everything.
 
So, not breaking out the wine yet and not in any particular hurry, lets say though, that we will be finished by the 24th of this month. That gives us about seven weeks (four I think with Conner going back to school) to maybe do some more work. A single, perhaps, or record some more California Adios songs. Wouldn't that be funny if that album took me three years to finish? Ha!

ALso
 
Sex Funeral Concert Tonight (7/16) 6 pm ? thereabouts. House across from the Peach Pit.

Ghost Town Keyboard Fight
 
So I'm walking down the street and it turns into an abandoned ghost town. Every door I walk by has a monster inside. Basically, I have to kill the monster with music. I have this keyboard that I am thankfully taking a walk with in the middle of the night and it, with certain melodies, shoots out lazers that will kill the monsters. These are monsters that you know from movies, monsters like the Frankenstein monster, and the Wolf Man, and a Zombie. So the way the song goes is I'm about a minute into the walk and I see that I've just opened the door containing the Creature from the Blue Lagoon and now he's chasing me.
 
So I'm running from the Creature and.. hold on, I have to mention something, I have this problem with shoelaces. I always have to tie my shoelaces like three times or more because I'm convinced that they are not going to be tied tight enough otherwise. Another thing I should mention about my shoelaces is that they always come untied right as something important is starting to happen. So they have come untied as they usually do and I'm starting to tie them, but then gravity goes weird for some reason and the shoelaces start sliding out like spaghetti or something. So I'm panicking and I finally get the laces tied and am not worrying about them and I turn to face the Creature but he's floating away - the gravity has got him too.
 
So I am walking and I turn to find that there are five creatures following me: A Dracula, Godzilla, Two space Aliens, and a Ghoul. So I turn to face them with my lazer keyboard and press the right diamond keys and cause a photon ruckus to pioneer straight towards their brainskulls which proceeds to cause them infinite pain and disappearance and everything is looking fine and cheery and then I look ahead and see this ramp that leads up, almost straight up in the air.
 
I've seen this ramp before, I've gone up this ramp before, its just that the rules change once I've gone up this ramp, I'm no longer shooting on the ground, I'm shooting at the monsters that come at me from the air, and when I'm airborne I have a much harder time aiming. So this happens and my heart jumps, skips a beat, skips on the other foot, and hops all the way home just to prove to its muscles that it can. I land and start running, cause dude, MONSTERS.
 
The last section is a field that's pretty much just full of goblins and they're hacking at me and I'm running and using my beam-piano and they're getting me, they're getting me, scratching my legs and biting my arm whenever they can cling on to any pretty human flesh. I'm firing and I'm thinking 'isn't this field over?' 'doesn't this end anytime soon?' I can't press the keys fast enough. I'm running and its amazing. The field is over, the song is over.
 
I press the spacebar because that stops the recording. I then right click and delete the wav file that I just recorded, because I know it wasn't good enough, it didn't create enough of a path for the next travellers down that ghost road, the guitar part, the percussion part, the vocals, the extra keyboard parts. Two more takes of it and I'm done. I switch off the keyboard, switch off the amplifier, switch off the microphone, switch on the fan. Its hot. Today it was a hundred and two degrees.

But You Already Knew

Album we're recording = not Love Drums. Its another one of these 'to the side of Love Drums' things we're doing. Several of the songs are still brilliant and several more are approaching brilliant, so you will hear them when it is appropriate.

Tomorrow (today) we're working on the songs "The Angry Song" (which isn't its final name, its just the one we call it, which Conner and I wrote while we were trying to make an example) and "I'm not breathing" which is a stupid name but its a lyric from the chorus.

Blueberry Boat by the Fiery Furnaces is getting much love from what online press I've read so far, this is good. I'm sorry the Fiery Furnaces that I have not been able to convert many to your ways, hopefully Pitchfork can.

AND As soon as we get the artwork from Vincent, we'll release "Speed Dogs" as a single with two delicious B-Sides whose names are still being argued over.

I've been watching an average of three movies a day, sometimes they all blend together. Like for example, I saw "Bad Santa" right before "28 Days Later" and it wasn't as harrowing as it may have been, because I was thinking about the scene in "Bad Santa" where Bad Santa says that he's good in a fight because he's an alcoholic and doesn't feel pain, so when the people are getting hit by zombies and shot and stuff in "28 Days Later", my movie-addled brain has me thinking 'oh it doesn't hurt'.

Two last things:
1. I'm planning on a sleep-deprivation experiment
2. Conner is pacing around the room deep in thought and has been for an hour. He is thinking about drums and how to put a microphone close to them.

Right Now

Chasing arctic wolves across vast snowy plains. I am some sort of clumsy mammoth, the guitar tone I want is a pack of wolves. While I lumber, they maneuver. I trip over petrified trunks, they adeptly dodge overhanging branches. When I am doing overdubs I go into a very cold place. In my brain, everything goes white and my body and mind struggle to work together to achieve a swiftly changing figure in the distance.

This would be a really nice post if it didn't belong to the worst song that we've done so far that I'm trying to save. So strap a first-aid kit on that mammoth.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the ubiquitous guitar/microphone cords, those are arctic snakes or something.

RE-DO

So even though there are a couple brilliant songs done, none of them are sounding anything like what the Love Drums album should sound like. SO we are starting over. Conner has set his drums up so they are taller and I am writing songs on a keyboard again, because togetherness produces shiftlessness and shiftlessness produces less full songs. ANYWAY, expect frequenter updates as I get used to the 56k.