Lions always get the height, cause to kill, it's always been the easy way out.

It would be easy to just be 'done' with the album. I mean, everything as it sits on the hard drive right now is very 'presentable', but that isn't the way James Rabbit 2K5.7 does things. No, we let things simmer, we give it a week or so, maybe some percussion overdubs and some handclaps. And then, the media blitz that is album-release time.

On Wednesday night we did a lot of harmony vocals and some marimba tracks. On Thursday morning, Conner did some 'mixing' that he thought probably sounded good, but actually just made a lot of the vocals too quiet, so we'll probably spend an afternoon getting those back. And then we'll spend a few evenings of Conner trying to get me to stop pacing while he adjusts volumes and yell at him to "TAKE THE FUCKING REVERB OFF!!!!!" and then we'll slap together a booklet ('slap' in this sense means 'touch with loving care') and get zillions of copies out to press outlets.

Next, we'll either call Sam back to record the first few songs from Too Loud or we'll just start right in on Cavalier. Maybe Conner and I could do Too Loud in secret by ourselves in a few days. Searing rock hard guitars? Yeah, I could totally pull that off.

Anyway, when you are listening to Continental a week or two or three or four from now, when some weird part in the background pops out at you and makes you think 'well damn, there goes my afternoon, I'll just have to put this fool album on repeat AGAIN', these next few days are the days in which we dreamt up that part and inserted it while you were at work or enjoying a cool Summer beverage during your 'Summer Break'.

Hm? What?

Also, I should mention that everything is sounding surprisingly GOOD. Conner and the technology beast are spending long and comfy nights with each other, making things awkward for whoever walks into the room. He's all co-mingled with wires and computer keyboard and that glowing, accepting monitor and turns as you open that door and yells 'get out! we're busy!' and then in a few hours I return and say, 'um, I'm sorry about what happened earlier' and he says 'hey, shut up, listen to this':

And that thing that we played a week ago that we had to stop halfway through to get to my heart appointment and punched-in-recorded the rest later, the song where we couldn't figure out why the drums wouldn't stop rattling or why the bass' tone was absolutely wretched (I say it ISNT my playing!), the song where we kind of winged the bridge because we couldn't remember exactly what time signature it was, that song, it sounds GREAT. Gone are the awkwardnesses of not knowing "exactly" what to play, gone are the scrummy drum "tones", here are the future and welcome to it.

When I'm thinking of an album or a set of songs in my head, it doesn't sound like anything in particular. I'm a very generous listener with tone. This allows me to like eighties bands, because if you are just listening to 'oh, the snare is THERE', the music becomes more locational than impressionistic, you become less a wanderer of a museum and more a wanderer of a garden maze. It doesn't matter what the material is, as long as it is blocking your progress, it doesn't matter whether the snare was built of wood and canvas or built of zeros and ones, as long as it goes somewhere and sounds forceful enough. What I hear in my head is a combination of Wagner and Thomas Dolby.

But as far as my music goes, as far as what I have control of, I want things to sound super organic, I wanted to make an album that sounded like something Todd Rundgren or Donald Fagen would have been in charge of recording, and things are sounding very positively in that direction. I mean, we aren't jazz geniuses or even actual geniuses, but we're reclusive, and that's one half of the equation.

WEEKNIGHTS PICKING FIGHTS CAUSE I'M OUT OF MY MIND

These past few days I've been alternating between screaming into the microphone, pounding on the guitar and gently caressing the keyboard.

We're closing in for the kill, but its the kind of closing in that happens in a really good war movie, where you see the heroic squadron rounding a corner from above only to be shown that there is, in fact, a whole new secret enemy army hiding there that is going to make things shooty and poignant in a minute. There's the San Fransisco Drifter single that is twelve continuous minutes long and has about thirty different parts, I've got to revise the piano part in section 14, got to write a few lyrics. Mainly, the concern is getting around to doing these things. I tend to be daunted with the larger/more sensitive projects and I tend to place these in my path, preventing me from doing the easier, more fun ones.

Conner and I are going to be experimenting with new drums sounds for a new project. I'm leaving Fresno, but not before we record Cavalier and I get some money together. We don't have a guitarist. But I write this like I'm saying 'we don't have a savior', just like any red blooded american can play the guitar, anybody can put on some sandals and grow a beard and walk around like they don't care about owning the place, but give him some water and that water is going to stay water. Give any ol guitarist a guitar, and that guitar is going to stay water. So we've got some watery perspective guitarist, but no winery. I don't know what I'd do if we did have that guitar saviour though, because the smell of wine makes me sick.

Megan expressed a certain emotional interest in Continental, having heard some unfinished tracks, which is pretty exciting. We've got to get copies of these out there, this seems like a good start for the popular James Rabbit. Worse bands have gotten better exposure out of worse albums. I'll just give out promo copies to everybody. We'll start a fan club about ourselves and pretend that we have interests outside of our music, we'll distribute CDs to overeager kids outside of local concerts and build a loyal fanbase of 'thanks for the cd, man'.

PS, I have no idea how to get a job.

Please Don't Make A Scene

Today, I layed down all of the piano tracks for the album (I hope) at Dan's house (AKA Fabulous Underground Recording Studios). Things went ridiculously fast, I know all the chords and changes unbelievably well, it was just a matter of me remembering where some of them went. Hmm... did Chorus B of the second part of the song start with fm6? Or When in the interlude does the song modulate to E for a measure?

Things are sounding really good. Earlier album-related depressions dealt with whether or not we'd be able to make it sound like what it sounded like in my head. And of course, I don't really hear the rhythm section in my head, so when I hear just bass and drums belonging to the self-proclaimed masterpiece that is "Cold Builds Character", for example, it makes me worried and angsty. But with piano and some (carefully planned) keyboards, it sounds pretty close to what I thought of it as. And recording piano at Dan's was so easy! We can totally do this again!

I have to do some vocals and more guitar and more keyboard and then Max and I will spend a bunch of time on harmony vocals because everything is better with harmonies. There's a few horn parts that I'm going to do. It will be interesting to see how good we can make them sound with this new-fangled set-up. And then we'll probably just release the album and some singles, because we haven't heard anything from Sam. Maybe Max has. Maybe we'll abandon the Too Loud album. Or Maybe we'll just record it with us three. This is what happens when we try to expand the band.

What Do You Want From Me? I Can't Guess!!!

I've got insane plans for upcoming albums, including a short album with three really long songs on it and a two cd set of singles from our (fictitious) glam years. I've got ideas for their covers and ideas for their songs and ideas for everything except I've got no idea how to get all these other ones that we're working on out of the way. I asked myself today if we still knew the third of Too Loud for the In Crowd that we wrote. Because we still have to finish that before we can release Continental. Oh Sam, what are you up to thats better than James Rabbit?

I'm going to lean slightly towards playing live shows. Max and Conner seem pretty good at doing them constantly and I'm a pretty good performer, maybe we'll put a seven song set together or something, bring some relevance to Fresno live music. Although, there are a few things we need to do before this. Primarily, we need a guitarist, someone that can fucking hang in there. Nobody too jaded, I don't want any drinkers or philanderers. Mainly, we need somebody who has a suspiciously large amount of free time and picks up things ridiculously fast.

How do you find a guitarist though? I mean everybody plays the guitar, but I'm kind of looking for upper-quartile abilities and somebody that I can also get along with. So that eliminates about 98% of all guitar players. So lets say that there are one thousand guitarists in America that fit this bill. And lets say that two hundred of those are in california. 60 are in san francisco, 50 are in northern california, 60 are in southern california, leaving 15 in rural parts of the state and 15 in the central valley. Now, of the fifteen in the central valley, there are about two of these who go to parties and aren't drinkers or philanderers, so basically what I have to do is start going to parties (never mind the fact that I don't want to see anybody I know and I don't want to talk to anybody that I don't know) and ask everybody randomly a) if the play the guitar b) if they are good enough to play for us c) if they have the free time. Or we could just hold auditions and perform character exams:

"Okay, could you play the C# melodic minor scale while lying upside-down? Oh, and while you do that, would you like us to fix you a dry martini? No? Well, that's great (approving scribbles)... How many James Rabbit albums have you heard? ... No, no we didn't do that song... no, you're thinking of James Brown."

School is closing in for Conner and Max and potential guitarists. When we finish Cavalier (the album after Continental) I'll get a job. I don't know what the fuck what after that. We'll keep on doing albums. Summers don't always work like they should and they finish before you are done with them. I don't know what the fuck went wrong with this one. Last Summer we did Artillery and then had all the rest of the time for The Drop. This Summer it was like we started doing an album and that pissed away and now we're in the middle of another album but the end of the tunnel keeps on getting further away and we've still got this other one to do after this one and the semi-aborted one. And THEN we get to do the ones that I was writing right before summer began. So lets not even consider the ones I was writing for at the beginning of summer. And lets not even consider considering the ones I was outlining on the train today. Because when the past hasn't happened yet, and will not happen in the forseeable future, the present is just a static mess.

My first band, Doomsday Parade, did about eleven or twelve "albums". Every time we 'practiced' we would 'learn' a song and then I would secretly record it on one of our parents boomboxes, and if it went really well, the other members would get copies. I had a sheet of paper that had a list of album names up to twenty, and I just really wanted that list to come to life, so I recorded the other eight albums without the band. Actually our double album (Number 14, titled "Crankesque") I recorded with the band in the room, but they were playing Final Fantasy Seven. After our twentieth album, "Casino Crusader", which was pretty much just French Horn and Drums, I broke up the band without telling anybody.

But James Rabbit has seen too many miniature successes to call it quits. I mean, not many successes that you would acknoweldge, but a lot of intangible ones, like the rehersal tapes to "Trauma Season" are a pretty entertaining listen. We did an album where we did fifty songs and for each copy randomly selected a tracklist of 25, that's pretty cool. I just want to get this stuff done. You won't love it, you will not even hear it. I don't know what I want and I don't know what drives me. But its driving me batty this Summer.

The idea behind Summer is that it is a tease, it is three months of deceptive freedom. And once you have that deceptive freedom for good, you just look up at all of your peers who are locked up in prison and wonder, whose windshield to you have to smash to get in there with them?

YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE CONTROL OF YOURSELF

I've been doing guitar overdubs. I'm pretty good at playing the guitar my way. Unfortunately this results in a lot of bar chords and single note riffs. I'm a bit afear'd that the guitar parts won't have enough high sounds in them, because I have no knowledge of how to incorporate those strings into chords without hurting my fingers, but things are going to come out sounding bonkers. I can't send enough props out to Thor for teaching me about amp modelers.

So the way it goes is that there's these little files on the computer called something like 'Leave The Lights Off.cbs' and I open them and they've got, lets say three tracks. That means all we have done on them is the rhythm part. So I call Max over and say "Hey, fellow, lay some MIDI keyboard down, show us how its done" and he'll do and we'll be pleased with it. Then I'll put a guitar part to it, rhythm guitar to start. Usually this is just playing the chords along with the bassline, or placing exclamation points along with the drums. Then I put the vocals in and it sounds like crap and then Conner comes along and puts something called 'compression' on them and makes them sound just dandy.

So that's where we are for most of these tracks. What we'll be doing next are melody guitar and melody keyboard. That's where all the James Rabbit magic comes through. And after that we'll put the harmony vocals in and then zany percussion over everything. Then Conner and I will spend a few sleepless nights 'mixing' and 'mastering' and then the CD will be ready for its sweet oblivion.

My brain is getting happy and angered and depressed and manic about all of this at unexpected places in the process. Last night, I was struggling over a guitar part for about two hours and I was pleased as punch. This morning I layed down three guitar tracks flawlessly and I was sad as a lamb.

Another thing that I've been agonizing over is the artistic merit of this album. When you are listening to the playback of just the rhythm parts and the vocals, things sound very bleak, very college radio, so I just have to trust in myself that the lyrics are brilliant enough and trust that the melodies will be melodious enough and trust that the harmonies will make your hair stand on end and trust, trust, trust, because its wrong not to believe in yourself or your band.

We'll be finishing up the rhythm tracks this and next week, beginning immediately on the next album.

Triage

Recording an album is like working in an army hospital near the front lines. You never know what's going to come in, and there's a good chance its going to die. Part of you likes the danger of it, and part of you would rather be at home in Mississippi working at an auto parts store.

She's going through this Desperate Phase

How many other bands/recording artists find themselves CONSTANTLY to the point of irritation, having to invent new devices to make recording possible. Headphone-amps? What the hell are you on about, Conner?

Unfortunately none of this stuff is making us sound crazy or good, we're using all this brainpower, stuff that could be put to good use fueling some corporate machine on the kind of basic shit that we should already have or know.

I did a lot of useable guitar overdubs last night, though.

Continental Day Z

These songs are just a part of me, they are nothing I can't figure out. Its just a matter of getting to know them and then strategizing against them, as if I were getting ready to fight myself in battle. And like me, they never took karate in elementary and middle school. They were never seriously involved in sports. They haven't been able to exercise the past week and a half because of high blood pressure. A bad case of hypochondriacism is keeping them from all activity. In fact, they are currently mired in indecision regarding their future. A slight wind could blow them over, and I gotta tell you, girl, I'm a twister, born to blow away this album.

So check this out: Call me the record assassin. I'm going to plan this shit, I'm going to hide behind planter boxes and I'm going to huddle on busses waiting for the song to walk by all hunched over, wearing a polo shirt, nondescript Adidas and those grey slacks and I'm going to take my guitarknife or my trumpetgun and I'm going to rip that weakling a new vacation hole. I'm going to wake up from my schizo dreams about where exactly this guitar part is going to go, I'm going to feel my fingers tingling because in my sleep I've been moving around frets and I've been playing more than three notes at a time and I'll go see the doctor and he'll say its sonambu-SHREDDING that's making these digits all delicate, but doc, I can't confine the rock.

Max and I will spend six hours on two notes of a solo because that's the kind of luxury we have. I'll have a guitarist come and watch while we play keyboard parts and I'll have a trumpeter come and watch while we play guitar parts. I'll hire a gardenening service to come and shout along to the singalong parts so people will know when to sing along on the album. Basslines and drumlines will be rerecorded by their original players and by the other band members. We're borrowing a guitar from Vincent of Dying Within, so we've got a guitar now, which makes us officially a rock band. And we'll start rocking, but when the time is right. Enough talking, time to DO.



I'm going to get a job after we finish Cavalier. Only because I need time before the other albums. Everybody will still be here.

Continental, More of

The last two days of practice/recording for Continental have been hectic. I've been having to rest a lot because of chest pains (aggravated by too much sudafed a few weeks ago). I think I'll be fine, but it sure sucks when you are bearing down on the last song of the day. I get these chest pains when I get frustrated, and this happens a lot. First, I get frustrated if everything isn't a masterpiece automatically, which is partially my fault and partially Conner's fault. My fault for being tired with songs already that I wrote back in April and Conner's fault for not loving them.

The songs, as they go, exist in a few different dimensions. There's the concept, where I take a few words and expand on them for a title. At this stage, any song is perfect, as it is when you read the names of songs on the back of a CD for the first time. The title "Endless Loop" promises just that, the title "Fuck Da Management" offers cathartic workplace rage, etc... Then there's the song, where I write down chords and lyrics and hopefully a melody pops up in there somewhere. Obviously it is going to lose something in the translation between your brain and the keyboard, depending on your abilities. Then there's the song as an arrangement, where it is presented to the band and thrown up in the air, because, honestly I can't think of what the keyboard is going to actually play and seriously my understanding of drums is so so basic and I'm not actually a bass player and I don't feel ANYTHING when I look at guitars, so how could I possibly think like a guitarist? So from what I've thought of it as to how the band is playing it, and then it loses another layer of relevance during the recording process (we are inching closer to professionalism every day), and it probably loses more during the overdub phase.

So I watch my perfect beginnings: "She's a Ghost", "United States Cooldown", "Bourbon", etc... mutate into lesser and lesser entities until -rather than the epitomes of poetic justice I had imagined them as- they become watered down college-radio-ready pearls of useless audio jelly, floating invisibly in the air, not accomplishing anything except being a notch on the belt of the album that did nothing for me like none of the others ever have.

So that's where I am right now, miserable that I can't create correctly, miserable that my band can't save me, miserable that I've got twelve, sixteen, whatever tracks of bass and drums that I can't play guitar to, I can't imagine keyboard parts to, I can't fathom singing them correctly, they're just sitting there, mocking my inability to be a successful musician/human.

I'm hurt and sore and tired and allergic to outdoors. But I'm hopeful, kind of. We're about halfway done with Continental and then move on to a better set of songs with Cavalier. Who knows if we'll ever finish Too Loud, I dont really have the strength to chase everybody around for that. If nothing else, my grandchildren will have some more cds to find and laugh at, at the bottom of some Target-built memory chest. Oh, Grandpa, you were such a fool before you finally gave up and became an office boy.

Continental Divide

On Friday, Max and I went through the first six (five) songs of Continental and thought out keyboard parts. He came up with this really good melody for "United States Cooldown", sort of sounding like it is going to be a solo, but we'll probably have a bunch of instruments, trumpets, guitar, keyboards, doubling it and it isn't quite swift enough to be a solo. Anyway, in the future when you are listening to the album and thinking 'wow, what a good part!' give Max credit for that one.

I keep on forgetting what it feels like to be doing albums like this. Either it feels like I'm doing nothing, during the times that I am being less than productive (those long stretches during the day when I'm deciding whether to buy a two hundred dollar guitar or go back to playing minesweeper), or it feels like I am going to pass away from overexposure to the musical rainforest (those long stretches during the day when Conner and I take on six songs at a time, or those long stretches of the day after we have finished recording the rhythm tracks where I'm sitting there thinking about whether or not to buy a two hundred dollar guitar.) So at any given time my brain is either plagued with guilt or plagued with boiling red blood cells about to burst and aneurysm and kill this still-young son-of-a-gun. Employment is still nowhere near on the horizon.

I'm 'writing' for some other albums as we are in between doing these ones. The writing involves me doing a lot of 'research' and pushing things around in the ol' noggin until they are ready to come out fully-formed songs. The ideas I have are big and grand and keep me around Fresno for at least a little bit longer.

I AM STILL WORKING ON HOW ALL THESE USELESS IDEAS TRANSLATE INTO A PAYCHECK.

GET OVER YOURSELF BRAINLESS YOU ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM ANYBODY ELSE OUT THERE YOU HAVE TO PAY YOUR DUES LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.