Hot Lunch!

So its nearly three am in Fresno California and I am accidentally wired. Conner and I were doing some touch-up work on our insanely long one of our songs and he brought back two of the disgusting-but-hey black mountain dews and we worked long and hard on computer stuff and four different companies ideas of reverb (that you will never detect) and so conner passed out on the couch while I was supposed to be listening to the final product, but seriously, I'd heard it so many times (I did a trillion horn overdubs today, so I must have heard it) so I listened to the Cocteau Twins instead. We have plans to record the final remaining two songs tomorrow so he decided to go to sleep and I stayed up and played video games and as I was about ready to fall asleep at the computer or something I discovered the second black mountain dew and drank it and then later when I wanted to get some water for hydration purposes found that I was walking more stylishly and faster and ninjalike than usual. Anyway here I am freaking out a little about the tracklisting and whether or not we actually got 31 songs done in a little under a month?!

And they are all pretty good, like this one that Conner keeps on asking to hear whenever I'm on the computer, and today he said "You need to turn down that horn flurry, its too distracting" and I said "There's no horns, that's a banjo part" and we both discovered something in that moment. I don't know what he discovered, but I discovered a world of wonder. And I put stars by all of the songs that I was really proud of and there were eleven stars! That's so many stars! That's like single caliber! And if I think about it, there's actually one more. Well not quite a star, but we're thinking about releasing it as a single. Maybe its a star for Grayson.

When I made stars for Artillery, there were maybe three or four stars, which means that the ratio for great songs: good songs was one to three, which is pretty good for an album. That means the ratio for this album is pretty much the same, except for that right now there's one song that we aren't quite sure about, but I really want to keep it and it might be a treat for the kind of people that are into that specific kind of music.

Also earlier tonight I was walking around and thinking to myself: why aren't I dead right now? And the answer is because there is a lot more help on this album. For example, the few songs I stressed out about a lot chordwise, Max was there with his crazy keyboard skills to help out with. As soon as we were done with the first twenty rhythm tracks, there were three or four days with Max one fine week and it was like the album was half done. Sam too, he filled in the melody part of things, adding things that James Rabbit has never seen. Grayson and Vanessa too added their own brands of chaos. So instead of me wrestling with chords and tuning and headphones and which input is which etc... its me sitting there and thinking the best way to impart how to play the part to someone who can play it better than me, with fewer takes. If I was going at this alone right now, it would be me sitting here playing a terrible keyboard part and Vanessa shaking her head and me saying "Oh, it'll sound good." and her saying "No way, Jose" and me saying, "I'll add reverb or something" and her saying "No way, Jose". So thank you a lot to everyone who has helped so far.

So yeah, the two CD thing is still go. And we have an hilarious way of getting the full album experience across to those we've only given one disc to. Hopefully we're closing in on the art and the booklet information.

Said sorry but I meant it hardly

Earlier tonight Conner and I went through many of the songs we are semi-finished with and he twisted around the rhythm tracks to make them sound more vibrant etc etc. I paced around the room as he jokingly put wah effects on rhythm tracks and said things like 'is it okay if I move this - uh oh! - just kidding! OW!'. I guess I'm listening too positively, because when he approached the tracks he was of the belief that things sounded dull, but they sounded fine to me. After his knob twiddling and effect layering though, it sounded a lot brighter.

Sam came over Friday and Sunday and did tuba, banjo and string bass overdubs. Everybody I have played these parts for is very happy and excited. These three instruments do a lot for genre placement. A well-placed banjo could make even the most light jazz song seem somewhat Celtic in a second. Don't worry, there's not going to be anything sitars or bodhrans, the instruments are OUR slaves, not vice versa.

We've got either two or three songs left to record, which is like manouevering the week on a dune buggy with all the tough sand dunes shaped like school or work or the possible visit to Sacremento on the weekend. Then everybody will swing by for a final overdub or two, I'll stress out about trumpet parts and such, and sometime soon you'll have a copy of the album (untitled as of late) in your hands.

This album seems a lot like the Le Fou to Artillery's Trauma Season in that the earlier albums (Artillery and Trauma Season) are a lot more spontaneous and rock-y, while the later albums are more spread out and all-encompassing. People will like them equal, because I seem to know the exact ratio of people that like my softer stuff versus the people that like my harder stuff. Either way I feel a little bit embarassed; the soft stuff isn't smart enough and the hard stuff isn't technical enough. The soft people wonder what happened to the melody, why's it so short? and the hard people at least appreciate the effort I put in, but couldn't I afford an actual distortion pedal? And does that guitar only have three strings? (Actually I've only been using the six string (now four) for this album)

A lot of this new album came about from me worrying about why I wasn't receiving any 'congratulations' plaques or awards banquets for Artillery, but if I had spent time practicing for concerts and going to radio shows, we wouldn't have had the time to record this wonder. I think after the album was finished, it was like I was at the end of the ski-jump ramp and rather than do a bunch of tricks and land, I decided to keep flying through the air (which is a hilarious image) and I'm still up there. They don't give gold medals for defying gravity, but they do so appreciate it.

Ideas you would not believe

Things are coming together and I am wrestling the demons down. One of the hardest things to do at this point is to go back and change all of the 'almost' takes of things. I mean, listening to the stuff I hear two things in all of these 'almost' takes. First, I hear the brilliance of spontaneity, the fact that I got the lyrics right right after writing them, and maybe some cool inflection (for me singing any inflection is cool). Second though, I hear the cruel reality of I'm-not-actually-going-to-be-able-to-play-this-to-anyone-else. But really people, so what if the pitch is off, how off can it be? I mean, if you put two notes together that's a chord and if you imagine the note that I'm supposed to be singing, then its a really close harmony. How many of you remember the music of the sixties? If you'd ever gone to a coffee house, they were groups with guitars singing in close harmony all the time. Really what I'm doing by 'missing' the 'intended' 'notes' is paying tribute to coffee houses of years past.

Seriously though, I'm fixing all of that. I mean, most of that. There's some 'almost' takes that are so nearly devoid of 'mis'takes that I'm just going to say 'F This' because I'm a bit sleep deprived and I feel the ghosts of sickness and paranoia creeping over shoulders, each one has their own shoulder. Sickness is over my right side because I deal with it more and I know how to get away from it. Paranoia is over my left shoulder because I look there less, even though I know its there. These twin terrors are both connected and not connected to the music that I'm recording.

Today Grayson came over and helped me shoot a few more arrows into the side of the behemoth that is "Hospital". We recorded us playing EVERYTHING as percussion, then lumped it all together and made it sound full and crazy, and that was half of the chorus. The choruses of the songs were the things that worried me most, because there's so many of them and there's not really much to the lyrical content of them. All I have to worry about it now is the loping middle part and the arrangement of the horns at the end.

I could go on for hours about the minutae of my long long days, but that would be boring. My days are full of recording and being distracted from recording. It is time to end this day.

I've got no wit, no kids, not prepared for this biz.

We're sneaking up on the completion of this beast faster than we'd expected. I'm polishing up most of the songs, doing three or four every night. Today Conner and I listened to a mixdown of most of the songs in their current forms, and it wasn't at all embarrassing.

I have to record a piano part for another song, as well as oversee some overdubs with Grayson and possibly Sam, but other than that, there's just a lot of lonely work for l'il ol' me.

I'm not expecting anything with this. The best way to not be disappointed is to not expect anything. In fact, I'll go into this expecting less than nothing. I'm going to assume that everybody I give this CD to is going to hate is and throw it in the street somewhere. You are going to wake up one morning and find Van Ness Ave. littered with Maxell CDs labeled Disc One: Footloose and Fancy Free and Disc Two: This Old Light of Mine. I'm joking about those titles. But you will find a bunch of CDs and think "Wow, I just listened to that CD I found on the ground and it was pretty uninteresting. I mean, there were some nice six part harmonies and one of the songs had a circular saw on the chorus, and I'll be damned if that wasn't the freaking best tambourine solo I'll ever hear, but there was nothing particularly interesting about it. All the lyrics were C+ quality and the basswork was clearly unstudied. And what was with that singer? Always writing songs that were very testing of his actually limited vocal range. And whining, though I suppose the whine is a given with this kind of music.

So I'll play it for people and give out copies and probably not let on that it is a double album, I might only just give most people the first CD. That would be pretty funny. Or I'd give them CD 1 and their friend CD 2. And since nobody ever talks about James Rabbit, they will never figure out the funny thing that I did to them.

Also with some of the lyrics I've had to catch myself from being too hilariously self-referential. Not like stuff like "My life is so sad" but stuff like "Conner, why does it take you/ thirty minutes to tune each drum?" and "This cello part/ needs work". So that first time you listen to the double album, hold that lyric sheet in your hand that you got from http://www.geocities.com/jamesrabbit/secondalbumthissummer (not actually the website) and peruse yourself silly.

How many bands are recording double albums right now? Think about this. Who was the last band to do a double album? Probably Wilco or someone. I mean, usually there isn't enough material to do a double album, usually it'll take a year to do a single album. Fleetwood Mac did a hell of a double album. Probably James Rabbit and Death Cab for Cutie. And which one will you want to listen to more? Ah! That's what I thought! But which one is easier to get a copy of? The Death Cab album. Yeah. And which one is going to get an 8.7 in Pitchfork? The Death Cab album. But which one will be forgotten in the back of station wagons for years to come? They both will.

I was never much for saving things

Eighty-seven minutes, twenty six songs. That's what we have so far. Some songs are very close to completion, others could stand to take a guitar or two upside the head. Its ridiculous how well-planned and orchestrated all of this is/was.

I'm happy right now, looking forward to a day full of not any particular recording. Make a movie, see a movie, have some dinner, you know, the kind of things that normal people do, as opposed to recording double albums which is the kind of thing that the James Rabbit people do.

I think we'll probably be done before September 10th, that's the target date of completion, which gives me a good week of Fresno-based accolades before I head off to the big S.C. September third would be pretty nice also, but I'm not going to be rushing anything.

I'm a bit torn between releasing this as a double album and cutting it down to eighty minutes and releasing it as a long single CD. It would be cool to have someone open a crummy little jewel case, expecting like a five song EP or something and BLAM! Double album! I think we'll probably have twenty eight songs when we are all through with this. Oh, shucks. I don't know, a single album seems pretty good. I mean, how many people this summer recorded not one album, and not two albums, but one album and a double album? Probably only me and Ryan Adams. And you don't want to hear Ryan Adamses.

The problem with giving out double albums is the added cost of an extra CD per person. So if we made twenty copies of the album, that would be forty CDs. But really, twenty copies is a bit optimistic. And really, I could just give the people that don't really care the first cd or something. And if they liked it, sell them the second for eight dollars.

I have to sleep now because I haven't been.

My Pager's out of batteries; here's how you can reach me:

So things are getting complicateder and isolateder and the album seems to be increasing in length. So maybe we won't use the fourteen minute take of guitar-keyboard-bass screeching, and maybe the end of that one song we won't stretch out to five minutes, but we keep on recording and overdubbing new songs.

I get more excited as this goes along, but also more stressed. I've given myself the deadline of midnight tonight (saturday's beginning) to finish writing lyrics to all the songs. There's actually only a few left. Five if I think about it. Then we have two full weeks of hectic overdubs and so forth. The vocals I'm recording right now (well, in a few minutes) sound pretty good, I'm doing this thing with two mikes where I put my head in between them and make each one represent a different channel (left and right), so it makes this really full sound and I don't have to sing it over and over, double tracking it. It also gives a better idea of what I want the song to sound like, rather than what the one microphone configuration makes it settle for.

I'm happy at this album for several reasons. It is messier, but smarter at the same time. Things aren't as accurate as the Artillery songs, but the songforms themselves invite a certain room-for-genius-afterthought to the proceedings, its like the frame is simpler, but the interior is more complicated.

And this album is a lot more complicated, I think. You'll see. When I premiere it there are going to be a lot of furrowed brows and a lot of full bladders (because the album is long in duration). We're putting a lot of thought and effort into this, and hopefully it will show.

Semi-Panic, Day 2

So this morning found me waiting around for Grayson to come by with his new Mini-Korg. As I waited, I paced and eventually started doing some scratch vocals. As I flipped through the books of lyrics, I noticed that there are relatively few songs that already had lyrics to them, contrary to what I'd earlier thought. This means I have to do this thing where I sit in front of the computer screen for five hours listening to a song over and thinking and typing... 'mysterious whimper... no, mysterious WHISPER' and then those become lyrics. I spent about an hour on the first half of the song "Hospital".

I am very tired. My body is very tired. I want to just brush my teeth and go to sleep, but there's a thousand steps to shutting down the backroom, turning off the computer, switching off the speakers, closing the door, shutting the curtains, turning off each of the three lights, etc. I'm fatigued. What's worse is that my day starts pretty early tomorrow. I'm feeling on the downward slope towards un-wellness and I should probably start taking better care of myself.

So the work that I NEED NEED NEED NEED NEED to do hinges on the whims and schedules of the rest of the band, and as they go on with their lives I'm just sitting here, waiting for them to devote some of their time to me.

I'm watching the olympics. There's swimming on TV right now. Two of my favorite moments last summer dealt with sticking my head into bodies of water. I haven't done that recently. I had a dream last night that a bum stole my luggage.

Brought to you by Swann's Baby Soap

Its looking like semi-panic time. Today I was stressed out beyond belief for no particular reason, other than that I was spread rather thin. I felt bad telling people things like 'I have to be home now' and 'Conner we have to finish this tomorrow', but they were necessary statements.

The worst part about me not having time for anything is that when I do have time for things - like right now, for the album - I am not working on them. Or, even worse, I'm making the album more difficult. I just wrote this insane song that's terribly difficult and terribly fun (to sing at least), but that isn't getting us any closer to the pile of songs that we need to complete.

With Artillery, it was this scary mass of mystery, because the way it worked is we did the songs and then I had to take a step back, partly in fear of 'are the drums too loud?' and 'did we play all eight bars of the chorus?' but partly because I didn't know what else to do with them. With this album, many of the songs have ideas and lyrics and directions already, and all I have to do is give them just a smidge of attention.

The problem is, I'm being more inviting with overdubs this time, and so I'm giving the other band members a go at my ideas before I have a chance to get to them. Also, the promise/threat of more rhythm tracks on the way is setting me back a bit. The reason I didn't record that keyboard part to the song that we recorded today is because I don't want to move the microphone (we have to share microphones between the rhythm and overdub phases) because the drum sound we got is too perfect (read: acceptable) to be messed with.

Grayson is up to bat this week. He said something about a secret weapon which is both very inviting and slightly worrying. I trust his input as to 'lets make things sound crazy', but I'm worried that if we do all of the overdubs before I lay down at least scratch vocals, things will be way too crowded. Have I mentioned that there's a ton of lyrics on this album? There are a ton of lyrics. Stacks of them.

Some time last week, Grayson, Max and I sat at Hungry Howie's pizza, hyptothetically pretending that with this album we were going to cover some really out there genre territory. But we are, so far. We still have to do that humming song, the crooner ballad (which I wanted to blend with this modernist composition song that Conner and I are working on, but that doesn't seem like it will happen), the free jazz song (I'm trying to get Sam Rocha of the Fallouts to play string bass, tuba and maybe some guitar on this album), and the frantic song that I have in my head that never really makes its way out. If we add this to the songs that we already have recorded and semi-approved, this is about thirty songs.

So anyway, I have a month left before I leave back for Santa Cruz. I'm giving myself three weeks to finish this album. A week of guitar overdubs this week with Grayson. Maybe a week or a couple days with Sam if he has any time, a few days with Max and backing vocals, and then hopefully a week to myself. Depending on how quickly these songs click into place, maybe I can complete these songs as we go, so I'll have more than a week to overdub vocals and general Tyler-ness into the album. But you know I'll work until the morning I leave. You know I'll take it to the college and finish it there if I have to. This album is going to be a monster of a mess. You'll love it.

The Next Logical Step

So, the thing to do after putting out the perfect hyperkinetic pop album (which is Artillery in my currently grandeured-out mind) is to put out the difficult double album.

I have in front of me a CD that is the result of Conner and I arguing through barely finishing rhythm tracks and then Max and I spending five or six hours at a time recording beautiful and clean keyboard tracks on the how-did-we-ever-get-a-hold-of-a-real keyboard.

Though everybody seems to be starting school in the next week or two, it seems like schedules will match up well enough for harmonies and guitars and horn sections and lyrics and percussions and cellos to be overdubbed onto this wonderful mess of an album. It will definitely be completed before I leave to Santa Cruz. Which reminds me, I'm sorry that I haven't changed the title of the journal, it will apply to me again in a little over a month.

We have twenty songs. The CD is eighty minutes long already. We have at least four more songs that we are going to do. Anyway, I am very excited, and you should all be very excited too.

She's got the Method for dealing with Being Missed

Sex Funeral show tonight, mysterious wound on right hand's middle finger. Was it from a guitar or was it from secretly dealt punches? I don' t know. Sterling got the entire set on film, I think, so maybe you'll see it as an afterthought of the Artillery documentary. Docu-drama.

I woke up the other morning and felt a lot of terror because I was hearing "Regime Change" in my head with a part that I should have added. This happens very rarely, that I'll finish a song and think of something that I forgot. So in the section where the song sounds like its falling down stairs in threes and you are thinking 'oh they must have forgot to add this part', just pretend I'm shouting cool stuff from a room away.

Tomorrow I'm introducing the rhythm tracks to the two fellows hopefully be helpin me with overdubs, Grayson and Max. So I'll play that for them and they'll respond I hope in either positive fashion or optimist fashion. And then we'll talk about what it is that I want to happen with each song and they'll say 'I can help you with that' or 'Tyler, nobody can help you. Either with that or with anything else.' I'm a little worried that the rhythm tracks will be too boring or normal, but I can blame that on Conner. He's the good one, all the pressure to succeed's on him.

I've got to start being nicer to people and I have to stop being so selective about my friends. I mean its working out and everything, I'm looking for the good in people, its mostly working out. I'm sure sometimes I come off as a monster. You guys, I'm working on albums.

A couple songs on the new album I hear a ton of promise in, I'm writing right now the first song on the album (which I always refer to as the theme song) its going to be an opener in the vein of "Hitsville UK" (almost an opener) or "All the Tired Horses". Really sing-y and upbeat. Maybe something like T.Rex, you know how those songs are always so peppy and run the chorus into the ground (run down marvellously)

Oh yeah, I'm crossing fingers for songs with saxophones and/or violins. I want to hear those right now. That's one of my main pushes towards doing music, I'll hear something in my head that doesn't yet exist, and I'll try to push it into existence. Right now my head has a saxophone jones.

Either you hasn't or you has

Oh so first the favorite three albums of the year so far.

1. Blueberry Boat - Fiery Furnaces. Close to impenetrable. Maybe I tried hard enough and penetrated it. I keep on thinking I will get tired of it and not want to hear it. I think the most depressing thing about this album and this year is that I had nobody to share it with - people were either offput by Eleanor's voice or the album's length - and if I did, I probably wouldn't want to share it with them. The best part of the album is that it is very much achievable. There are no stellar moments, no transcendental times like with other albums you sit back and think 'wow, what did you just do to me?', though parts of "Chris Michaels" come close, its basically seventy-six minutes of you listening and wishing you had done it instead.

2. Calling out of Context - Arthur Russell. Arthur Russell is the first artist I've had a bizarre high school girl crying into pillows (though there have been no tears) relationship with. Not over the fact that he hasn't called me back, but over the fact that everything he does (did) seems so simple and so perfect. You would listen to it and say to me "Tyler, he is just playing two or three notes on a crappy eighties keyboard to a simple drum beat and not even really singing over it" and I would say "yeah, but why does it sound so good". I would embarrass myself talking about things I've thought and felt while listening so I'm not going to go into it. He's dead now, Arthur.

3. Satanic Panic in the Attic - Of Montreal. Who knows if I'll ever listen to it again. This is another achievable album and in fact if you listen to it a bunch and then listen to Artillery you would say stuff to me like "Oh, so that's where you got the idea" and "What's Artillery?" and "What kind of guitar strings do you use?". The answers to those questions are: yes, an album by a band called James Rabbit, and Elixer I think they're called. There's cool guitar parts and moments where something could have been great. That last song is pretty special. I liked listening to it a lot at the time.

Other albums I've liked so far: The Hold Steady - Almost Killed Me (feels like I'm being lectured to). Electrelane - The Power Out (feels like I'm trying to pay attention to a pretty girl but am. distr. acted.) Kanye West - College Dropout (how rap albums always go, 'oh words going by fast' then 'oh that was a clever bit' then 'oh that was a clever bit'.) You know, probably more, but with this interweb thing I'm listening to albums a year before they come out, so stuff I got tired of in 2003 is still just coming out. Its mixed up. Sorry I wasn't more enthusiastic about these albums.

So Next, Some Stuff I'm Thinking

We've finished doing the rhythm tracks for this next album. We worked hard in weird little pockets of various weeks and now we've got like twelve or fifteen songs sitting here in front of me. They are good, if not as instrumentally impressive as Artillery. You would be hard pressed to pick out a Cactuses or a Speed Dogs from the pack, but we're not quite done with the songs yet, so DONT YOU DARE START JUDGING ME.

When I record the perfect album, the clouds will part and God will hold out his hand and say 'hop on up' and then I will have lunch at this really nice restaraunt where Arthur Russell, JFK and the newly arrived Rick James will be at a nearby table discussing chess strategies (in Heaven they play a lot of chess). I won't look at the menu because in Heaven someone else always foots the bill, and if that falls through you have to work in the dish room, which isn't too bad because Heaven restaraunts are always well-cleaned, so its just like working in an operating room, but on dishes, and their sickness is food. God will tell me about how Paul is the only Beatle not getting into Heaven and I will say 'no way, Paul's my favorite Beatle' and he will shake his head and talk about how John got it somehow really really right. See, I'm talking about the Beatles because you know they each had a seperate lunch with God. I'm stressed, worrying about the effect various pastas with various dressings will have on my stomach (still not fully recovered, you know), so I order a sandwich, roast beef. God runs through a list of albums that would surprise you, Scritti Politti's Cupid and Psyche '85? Dexy's Midnight Runners' Don't Stand Me Down? Roy Wood's Boulders? God, are you telling me that "When Granma Plays the Banjo" is a track worthy of perfection? And he says 'you must not understand the humor'.

Roy Wood has been to heaven. It happened when he was in the middle of recording the follow-up to Boulders, titled Mustard. He was sitting alone in the studio (in typical Roy Wood fashion) and he saw the clouds and the hand. God said he'd made the perfect album and Roy said 'Really? Did you listen all the way through on the second side?' and God said 'YES, those songs were striking pieces of pastiche' and Roy rolled his eyes. But then came the pressure of recording something that could compete with Boulders. God was talking about recording techniques and Roy must not have been paying attention and thought he said 'turn up the drums' when really he said 'try a drumstick' (God is a big fan of fried chicken, which you should be prepared to deal with, if you ever happen to yourself record a perfect album).

Green Gartside has been to heaven also. He wrote a song about it, but that was on an album from 1998, which was a bad year for artists that had previously recorded albums in the eighties. I don't know as much about his trip to Heaven. But Kevin Rowland. He hasn't. God opened up heaven to him and he declined. Something about justice not having been done.

Anyway, God has mentioned the Beatles and I'm scouring the room and not really recognizing a lot of the people, but seriously, who REALLY knows what Joan of Arc looks like? I mean, I picture a kind of big nose and a bowl cut, but you can't be sure. Its so much pressure. And besides, there's plenty of non-famous people up there, I should mention that. Its just that the restaraunts that God likes to take his terrestrial subjects to are frequently populated by former/current celebrities. So he's stopped talking about how underrated Revolver is and I've started listening again and he asks me who else played a big role in the making of the album and I say 'Oh definitely my brother Conner, he owns all the equipment and knows how to work it and plays the drums really really well, and could be really spectacular at either of those things if he applied himself, but we Martins have a tendency towards tangents' and God says 'Can I talk to him? I'm sure he'd like to talk about Buddy Rich' and I look at the clock on the wall (remind me later to tell you about this clock) and I say 'oh, he's working til eight today' and God says 'oh, I've got a chess game later with Gandhi' and I say 'how is he?' and God says "soooooooooo slow" and we both laugh and I go back to my room in Santa Cruz where I'm tuning a ukelele.

That hasn't happened yet. And it didn't happen after I finished Artillery, so we're doing another one. I mean, I'm very satisfied with Artillery, its just that, you know, no public reaction (aside from the typical death threats and genetic offerings), so here comes another one you guys. And its a pretty good bet I'll finish it, because I know what most of the lyrics are already.

Oh, and it will confuse you. Hopefully. It is going to be more of a coherent album as opposed to Artillery's each-song-is-its-own take on albumdom. I mean, when you condemn the album you will be condemning every song instead of specific songs. You will say instead of "that song Wide is too confusing" that "Tracks one through nine leave me feeling suicidal". Anyway. I've got to get back to life and get to sleep. I haven't done any overdubs yet, but I feel like they'll jump out quick enough.

Sounds Like Artillery

The songs that Conner and I are writing in these precious few remaining weeks are reminding me of how California Adios was going last summer at about this time. When you do one big album and then start and try and cram doing another album into about half the time that you did the first in. Wait, let's not use the word 'cram', that sounds too shoddy. I can assure you that we are putting all the effort into these recordings as we did with the Artillery recordings. The lyrics, for example, are shaping the songs more than they did with Artillery. With Artillery, it was this bizarre democratic process where Conner and I would stand there with nothing at all and pull something out of air together. With this its like I sit there with my fascist brain and fascist keyboard and sort it all out. So when I come with a song to Conner, it feels a lot more like Trauma Season or Le Fou, where I'd give him a song and he'd say 'THIS IS CRAP' but then we'd work on it for quite a while and we'd walk away from it thinking 'woo boy'.

So kind of woo boy. We worked for four straight hours today before realizing that we'd been working for four hours straight. We took a break and had some 7Up and then we went back to work. The way the recording stuff is set up it is quite scary, the bass in my hands (with screwy action and all, Grayson has threatened/offered to fix this) sounds like something new and exciting, because I am slowly coming around to bridging the gap between what my brain hears and what my hands can do. Has that become a cliche yet about musicianship? Because if it has, erase that from your memory. It hadn't occured to me until recently that practice makes you better. This is why the basslines in Artillery sound three times as good as the ones in Le Fou and six times as good as the ones in Heart of Gold.

Promoting the album is still looming. My usual practice is to distribute the album to the people/friends I know will give it a listen and maybe a few others that can help get the album heard in higher quantities. Who knows. I think the album deserves a spin or two on boomboxes of the enlightened and snappy, but if it isn't meant to be, there's always next album. So I'll ring Grayson and bother him about my project to befriend every alternative DJ in town so they can play my CD on the radio. I'm good at making friends.

The next time I write I'm going to write about my three favorite albums this year so far.

Since Wednesday

Caught a rather fierce stomach bug, premiered album, received well (kind of faulty first run), slept a ton, started a new game of Earthbound, drank so much (medicinal) 7-up, backaches up the wazoo, wrote five new songs.

I'm happy about what Artillery is doing so far. I think we'll expand the media blitz, maybe I'll find some song to be a b-side to "Cuba" and release that as the second single, but I actually haven't given out that many copies of "Speed Dogs" yet, so blah. Anyway, I'm pretty certain that this will be our first million-seller.

We have a few things to record for the documentary accompanying the album and then Sterling will go into no-sleep mode and then two weeks later we'll have that.