Work has finally begun on my next album, which will be my third official release (not counting the RPM album, since I didn't really release it, just gave it away on the Internets).  My good friend Casey Alexander, who engineered my first album, has played in my live band, and is currently making noise with Wesafari and I Am the Internet, is returning to man the boards (or, rather, the screen) for this one.

Casey and I got together a couple weeks ago, and listened through the pile of songs I've demoed since I recorded This Murder Is a Peaceful Gathering back in 2004.  There were a lot to choose, but given that it's been almost three years, maybe not as many as there could have been.  Still, there's some good stuff there, and we ended up picking 11 or 12 that we would move ahead with and record for this new album (working title: The New Optimism, which is a song I haven't even demoed yet that might or might not be on the actual album).  We also came up with a sort of theme or ethos for the actual recording, which would be that we would rely as exclusively as possible on real, live instruments, without effects or digital editing.  We will be recording using ProTools, but doing our best to use it as one would use a tape machine, rather than as a digital editing/trickery station.  We'll see how well we can adhere to that in practice.  Casey will be playing drum kit, I will be playing guitars and other auxiliary stringed instruments and singing; I hope Gavin Gregory will return on accordion and keys; and we might ask around for some interesting guest instruments.  But the idea is for the end product to sound warm, open, live, intimate, as well as cohesive but not uniform.  Again, that's our starting point.  It'll be interesting to see where we end up.

Yesterday was our first day of recording.  As is often the case, we're starting with drums (it's much easier to record other instruments on top of drums, rather than vice versa), which we get to do in a pretty nice space.  My friend James Nixon is, as well as a local engineering powerhouse (he's one of the house engineers at KEXP, works at Glenn Sound, teaches ProTools, etc., etc.), an instrumental person at The Vera Project, and has put in a lot of work on putting together a real, working studio at their new space in Seattle Center.  This space is brand new, and he was excited to try it out and see how it functioned, so the upshot is we get to use it to record drums in.  Hooray!  The rest of the tracking will be done at my home, but drums are always the tricky part, and being able to use this fancy new space is really exciting.  Many thanks to James and Vera for making that happen.

So yesterday morning, Casey and I rolled out of our house around 9:00.  We went down to Wesafari's practice space, loaded up their drums (thanks guys!), and headed up to the Vera Project.  We met James at the door at 10:00 on the nose, just as planned.  Off to a good start!  We (mostly Casey and James) spent the next couple of hours setting up drums, mics, recording gear, etc. etc. (this is pretty much the first session in this space, and we were using Casey's computer, so there was much patching and electronic hoo-ha to be taken care of), and then getting drum sounds.  Around noon I made myself useful and headed over to the Metropolitan Market (basically a gussied-up, high-priced Safeway for yuppies) to get us some lunch.  Somehow I spent $26; I'm still not quite sure how that happened.

Pretty soon we were ready to go.  I would be in the control room, playing and singing scratch tracks for Casey to play along to out in the live room.  We ran through a couple to get the sounds dialed in, and then started tracking.  The first song we did was "Colossal," a version of which is actually on the very first volume of Ball of Wax.  All I used for drums at the time was a snare drum with brushes.  Casey is keeping a similar feel, but expanding the sound a bit with a nice, boomy kick drum and some fancier playing than I can pull off on my own.  But the overall sound is simple and natural, which is the general feel for the whole record.  The coolest part for me about recording the scratch tracks was that I only had to do it once - for multiple takes, Casey could just play along to the tracks I'd just recorded until he was happy with his performance (I really appreciated this, as the tip of my left middle finger still aches a bit where I almost sliced it off with a pair of scissors a few months ago).

We did 4 more songs ("(God Is) Just Like Santa," "Seaplanes," "Mouse on Fire" and "Wheels within Wheels") after this, in roughly the same way, and they all went pretty smoothly.  Casey's playing, and the drum kit, sounded great, and everything is going pretty much according to plan.  For the last song of the day ("2 Wrongs/2 Wrights"), we changed things up a bit.  The only percussion I had on the original recording (also from a volume of Ball of Wax - maybe 2?) was an 808 drum machine sound of quarter note kicks.  We wanted to adapt that to the sound of this album, so Casey and James dismantled the drum kit, mounted the kick on a table, surrounded it with an insane array of microphones, and softly hit it with a mallet, modifying the sound in various ways until they got what the were looking for (not sure which mic we ended up using, but I believe the soud was achieved with a softly wrapped mallet, and perhaps using a hand to deaden the drum head - I should have been paying more attention here).  This is a very simple, droney song, so we just played through in one take, with Casey hitting quarter notes the entire time.  We can decide later where to fade in and out.  I think his arm was really tired at the end of that, which was perfect, as we were done for the day.  By now it was about 6:00 p.m., and we had put in a really good day's work, and done everything we'd planned on, in pretty much the time we had planned.  How often does that happen?

There will probably be some more drums on a few songs, which Casey and I need to work out.  In the meantime, we can take these tracks home and start fleshing them out, which is very exciting.

Thanks a lot to James and Casey for all their hard work yesterday, and to The Vera Project for letting us use their terrific new space.  I'm excited to watch this album unfold!