Yesterday we started what I suppose is pre-pre-production. Steve Loree walked into the Rosebowl with a suitcase containing a couple of mics and a laptop. This equipment it turns out constituted roughly half the audience for a while. So, there we were, playing in front of two mics behind which a giant screen displayed the Sunday night sit-com lineup. Mediating in that technological rhizome makes me nostalgic for the studio.

Recording: a fascinating process, how it truncates time while it expands space. It's not the composition that's captured, its directions, but rather the performance and the experience, the grain of the voice embedded in the pull of the bellows in the attack of the bass in the wail of the guitar; one sound more than the four of us sounding. The end result months from now will be a simulation, a perfected laboured over composition of cuts and bleeds, a labourious melding of the pragmatic and the ideal. Rock and country, ballads and punk.

Pretentious shit aside, I'm anticipating a return to the studio, to cigarettes, coffee, beer, and boredom - like one of our songs says, this is a relevant moment. And as Marxist Henri Lefebvre says, everyday banality is divided by moments of presence.

Mickey (accordion etc.)