Able Baker Fox

We all woke up at 8am and Nathan rolled into finish up guitars for “Stuttering”. After blowing minds with the Ripley guitar set up (you’ll see), Ben knocked out the rest of his vocals so he could get to the airport by 5pm. Then it was more vocals and guitars for Mike and Nathan.

We’re getting so close to finished at this point that the laundry list of things to finish after the out of town dudes leave for Nathan is much smaller than anticipated. I (Nathan) can’t ever remember having more productive studio days.

11 songs in about 50 hours is pretty unheard of for us all. We should be wrapped up after one more day of work with Ed.

The first half of the day was for Ben to roll through the songs and put his bass stylings down - after relearning the songs, of course. Vocal tracking started with “Face on Fire”, “Blind Writer”, “Stuttering”, “Dead Space”, and “Palindramatics”.

Ed took off around 8 pm and David Chutka let us yell in his ears for a bit. Got the bullhorn out for “Face on Fire”. We tracked from 9:30am until 1 am, and got a ton done today.

Jeff left mid day and it was a bummer to see him go, but his drum tracks being knocked out in less than a day (11 songs!) really laid the foundation for productive studio time. Big ups to Jeff.

Today we finished up all of Mike’s guitars. It’s always fun to build a wall of guitar amps. Mike almost tore the end of his finger off doing the guitar solo at the end of “Face On Fire”. It’s a face melter. We used the Big Muff pedal and it made the whole room shake. He couldn’t help himself and Dinosaur Jr. riffs started flying out of the room.

Next up was Nathan’s guitars. Full of studio magic, and headphone guitar sounds he made it through 8 of 11 songs and then it was break time.

Ben’s flight got in at 5:00 this evening. Dan (Second Nature) went to pick him up, since he was planning on coming out to hang. They showed up at 8:00, set up the bass sound, caught up for a few, then hit Lawrence for some dinner at Tellers and beers at the Bourgeois Pig.

We woke up around 7:30 am and started moving all gear into Studio B. Today we started tracking the record. It was damn good to see Ed Rose again. The last time we all spent time in the studio together was six years ago when we were working on The Casket Lottery/Small Brown Bike split EP.

Since we’re all flying in from different states, we’re borrowing guitars, basses, amps and drums. Jeff picked out a kit and Ed got the mics set up. After a few more minutes of getting the sounds tweaked, we got to work. When we practiced back in January, we kept track of the beats per minute for each song, so we just used them as the starting point for each song.

Jeff finished all of the drums, ate ice cream, and smoked cigarettes today. He’s a true pro. We started working Mike’s first track guitars after that and got through about half of them before we closed up shop. In the apartment above the studio we fell asleep watching Arrested Development, and ghosts watched us slumber.

After a year of trading MP3’s and one weekend worth of practice, the day is finally here.

Nathan picked Jeff up at KCI and headed straight out to Black Lodge for some rehearsals. Two songs deep we felt solid enough to head to Wendy’s for some Frosty’s. Picked Mike up at the airport at 9:00pm. After a quick stop for some food, we headed back to Black Lodge for a few more hours of practice.

The songs felt good and we didn’t make too many changes from how we left them in January. We closed down around midnight and crashed in the control room. Nathan heard ghost woman seducing him through the vents. The control room door mysteriously opened and closed at around 4:00 am. The spirits are with us, my friends.