Able Baker Fox

Able Baker Fox is a new project featuring members of Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery, and Coalesce.

We’re all excited to finally get the word out about this new endeavor. What started as a random phone call about baseball back in May 2006 has turned into this.

Here’s how it works:

Nathan Ellis (Jackie Carol, The Casket Lottery, Coalesce) - Vocals, Guitar
Mike Reed (LaSalle, Small Brown Bike) - Vocals, Guitar
Ben Reed (The Great Sea Serpents, Small Brown Bike) - Vocals, Bass
Jeff Gensterblum (The Holy Fire, Small Brown Bike) - Drums

Even though we’re all living in different states and playing in new bands, we decided that it would be fun to work on some songs together. So last summer we started sending ideas via the interweb between Missouri, Michigan, Illinois and New York to see what we could come up with. The four of us eventually got together to practice in Chicago and things went really well. The hardest part has been picking out the name (thank you KV).

Right now, we’re finishing up our 11-song CD/LP “Voices” with Ed Rose for release on Second Nature Recordings. Head over to our MySpace page (myspace.com/ablebakerfox) to stream two songs right now. We also have a preview CD coming out later this month with those two songs plus 16 other tracks from Second Nature bands (Rocky Votolato, The Blood Brothers, Vedera, These Arms Are Snakes).

We’re not sure exactly when “Voices” will be released, but keep in touch and you’ll find out.

Stay tuned,
Nathan, Mike, Ben and Jeff

myspace.com/ablebakerfox
purevolume.com/ablebakerfox
virb.com/ablebakerfox

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Nathan met up with Ed at the Lodge around 10 am. Recorded the last guitar tracks for “Palindramatics” fully effected with heavy delay, a Leslie cabinet, a Ripley Kramer guitar, and a piano to boot. This one turned out pretty damned good. Finished vocals for “October”, and “What Doesn’t Kill You Will Eventually”.

A few more random ideas involving an organ and a piano and this thing was wrapped up in just a few hours. Mixing starts at Eds house asap.

So we did it…five days, 11 songs and a whole lotta Doritos. Oh yeah, special thanks to Wheatfields Bakery in Lawrence, KS. If you’re ever in the area, stop by and order the Roasted Turkey and Cranberry Relish sandwich and a Ginger Almond Spice cookie. You’ll be happy you did.

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.