What started as a thought culminated into a plan that resulted in an amazing experience.
Bohemian Blueswill be the record that is crucial to our discography and has set the
pace for what we believe will be a very important record for the
history of the band.
We left Los Angeles on November 4th 2008, en route to a performance
in Tucson, Arizona - the very day Barack Obama was elected President of
the United States of America, taking the stage right after the
inauguration speech. The next day, we departed for North Carolina where
our album would be created in a building, once a bookstore, now
converted to a drafty music venue.
The drive through most the country was exceptionally uneventful. In
Little Rock we enjoyed some of the finest BBQ man has ever produced,
and Nashville was a night of whiskey and drunken debauchery, as Jon
chatted up a Canadian pop superstar and then proceeded to immediately
return to our friend John's house to blow chunks until the wee hours of
the morning. When we finally did arrive in North Carolina, Jon (who had
to drive the entire way due to me not having a valid license, and Ryan
not knowledgeable on the stick) started to become ill. The weather, and
frigid conditions of our "studio" eventually made us all sick. The
heater was too noisy to run when tracking, so we had to wear large
jackets and were forced to warm our fingers before takes.
The team we had signed up with was elected because of the unconventional recording methods and the sounds they produced.
Virtually everything was tracked on quarter inch tape, and many of the
instruments were done live and into room mics. It was all very rough,
live and vibey takes. We experimented with percussion that ranged from
conventional tambourine to unconventional storage locker. Ryan
Gustafson (singer/songwriter) and James Wallace were the brilliant
minds behind the process and we all just took it in. The philosophy was
vibe at all costs. If the take was sloppy but had a character, that was
the take we went with. Essentially, we learned how to record
interesting-sounding records.
The importance to us was not neccessarily the resulting record, but
the process we learned in making it. Within a month of returning home,
we had purchased our own quarter inch tape machines, a tascam
interface, microphones, preamps and all the other various requirements
to track albums WITHOUT the overhead of professional (and in our case
utterly unneccessary) recording studios and boutique gear. We even
mixed the songs ourselves and paid only for printing and mastering. We
wo'nt need to sell nearly as many of them to support ourselves, and
it's all going to go on iTunes. If anyone can suggest a purpose for
record companies, for us, feel free. I'm all ears.
