Weekend up

My last guitar session was yesterday. Trav and I finished up our tracks on USA #1 and Cinnamon Magic. I only have four songs where I need to set up some studio effects on certain tracks but we can do that during the mixing process. Then I'll be done. (yeah right!)

Next on the docket, vocals. Joe says he is ready for them. He's not going through a sordid breakup/divorce this time around so we'll see what happens. It has been almost 12 months to the day since we first began recording this stupid album. I'm feeling certain that he will do better this time.

Danny's buddy is working on cover art. He's an out of work tattoo artist who offered to come up with some different illustrations for the title "Over the Terminal Moraine". I think he has a good sense of what I envision it to be and he'll do a good job on it. It's nice to have other artists who are willing to throw in their two cents on an idea. I could do it myself, but I have felt like I wouldn't ever come up with something that I would be happy with. Best to let someone else do it and keep my hands out of it.

That's about it for studio news.

I'm more wrapped up in writing new songs. I've come up with a really cool idea using a long delay (about 700 milliseconds with a short decay) that has a couple differnt ways it can be applied. This isn't going to be one of those "crank it out and move on to the next idea" songs either. It's going to be a slow, over-analyzed process of trying out different directions for additional sections and then a long and tedious process of arranging those parts into an aggreable addition the the "Doomsday Annie" collection. (Doomsday Annie is the working title for the new batch of songs. Our idea was to create some sort of linking concept for our second album and Trav offered up an idea of a comet smashing into the earth. He penned a list of potential situations that differnt people would be in on their last night alive before the planet was destroyed and I've sort of used those ideas as mental templates for sonic directions. Once Joe gets lyrics written I'm going to make him settle on a track order and then take the time to come up with some musical segues. We talked about doing that with some of the songs on the first album but we were already in the thick of recording and I didn't want to take the time in the studio (on the clock) to craft some half-baked ideas that may or may not have worked out.)

We already have 8 new songs in reserve.
Track list (most titles are working titles only):
1. Cinnamon Magic
2. Pandora's Fuzzbox
3. Yes or No
4. The Lament of Al Davis
5. Cicada City
6. Enough Already
7. Nine
8. Song That Saves the World From Self-destruction

Writing the songs for our second album could potentially be finished in the next few months, allowing that I don't decide some songs suck and shouldn't be used. (Cicada City) I've got other new ideas popping up all the time, I just need to take the time to flesh them out. That's mainly due to my new christmas present of an ipod. It's been three years since my old mp3 player was ripped off. It makes the hours standing in front of a computer and copier fly by these days. Work? No... I was researching new ideas to steal and use on upcomming songs.

But enough about that... other mysteries occupy my mind and I'm keeping those in my head.

34 days (or so) until the Birkie!