The big news is we've finished and released our album, "Waking Birds Will Harmonize."  JFC, it's done.  Hours and hours spent standing over Josh's shoulder staring at the ProTools screen — or, failing that, snoozing on his bed — are over.  As is driving to Minneapolis to pace around the studio of our mixer and co-producer Andy Thompson, theoretically pondering the mix but in reality replaying a Dave Chappelle bit over and over in my head.

Here are a few points of interest on each song, just to shed some light on the process:

-         Here Now.  A short, ambient track we created at the end of the mixing process.  The material comes entirely from Today, the closer, in order to bookend the album.  Today fades out, so we had the opener fade in.

-         Where Is the Rose.  This one has some ungodly number of tracks on it; we sent about 50 to Andy and he added plenty more for effects and such.  Two of the tracks are me and Josh reading from the book Fast Food Nation; it's barely audible, but if you listen carefully, you might hear speaking.  This is probably our most prog-like song.

-         The Other Side.  Josh wrote this song for me, which obviously makes it very special to me.  Musically, my favorite part is the Beach Boys-esque harmonies at the end of the bridge.  At the last minute we committed to using a quasi-50s radio sound in the intro.

-         Smile.  I'm not gonna say exactly what the lyric is about, but here's a hint: it's more religious than you think.  We spent a lot of time tinkering with the arrangement — like, would drums work or not work? — and Andy played a big role in finalizing that.

-         Fly.  Notice the wine glasses?  This vocal is dryer than the others, but Andy thought this track could use the extra presence, and he was right.

-         You Are Good Enough.  I wrote these lyrics for Josh after we went on a camping trip last summer.  Andy helped with the musical structure — and played a mean accordion, too. 

-         Stuck.  Originally this song was going to be a slow, acoustic guitar type of thing.  Then Josh noodled around on the keyboard until he got the intro hook, and the whole dynamic changed.

-         Less Love.  We tried this a few ways — as an acoustic guitar song, as a full band arrangement modeled on Sondre Lerche, as something resembling a piano nocturne.  We settled on the latter, adding ethereal effects for good measure.

-         Tinnitus.  The last minute and a half of this one might be my favorite spot on the album.  Note the not-quite-silent last few seconds.

-         Love I Love.  On this one we just used the demo — no additional recording.  I got this vocal in one take, which is strange since it took me a gazillion takes to get the others.

-         Save.  A hopeful lyric here.  We spent a fair amount of time tinkering with the bridge, and we decided during the recording process to add all those harmonies at the end.

-         October.  This one's about our mother.  We tried a lot of different musical approaches, probably more than any other — an electric guitar intro (takes of which we later used as a semi-solo toward the end), a piano intro, a layered acoustic guitar thing…The experimentation got annoying after a while, but I like where it ended up.

-         Today.  The chant here was originally "Today is Friday but Sunday is on the way" — a biblical allusion and metaphor — but the syllables didn't quite work and no one got the reference anyway.  So we made it "Today is their day but our day is on the way."

And I gotta get this part in: if you want to buy it, go here.  It would make us happy.

TTFN.

Jesse