Some people think it's easy to make a record. Some people think it's hard to make a record. It's both.

We're making a record right now and there are some really easy things about it. Sometimes we just let our co-producer make decisions, or say that a harmony is really great, or not great at all. That's pretty easy, if you can let go like that. Which we can. And he's most often right. So that helps. Lunch is easy. When you're a duet, with only another engineer/producer guy, and sometimes his wife, it's pretty easy to decide what to have for lunch. Much easier than recording with a whole band. Tuning is easy. There are machines for that and all your banjo jokes aside, when you don't actually have to tune the banjo TO anything, it's pretty easy to accomplish. Picking songs is kind of easy. We like all the same stuff and no one else we know listens to anything we like, which makes it simultaneously fresh and strange for our listening audience. Which, by the way is a presumptive phrase. Don't think we don't know that. And doing weird stuff is easy. For us, anyway.

Hard stuff. There's plenty of that too. Sitting. Sitting is hard because you should be paying attention and sometimes you can't and so you shouldn't sit too long and expect to keep track of what the hell is going on. Remembering what to do is hard. You think you will but you get three notes in and all of a sudden all you can remember is the recipe for pumpkin curry, which is not very useful in that particular setting. We also don't care for punctuality. That's hard. Stepping back is hard. Stepping back far enough to know if you're being silly or too precious or reticent or just cautious and if it's cautious is it good cautious or bordering on timid which is not so good. And making a record that we care about, not just playing on a record someone else cares about is hard. Even if you care really really hard.

There is this one spot on the record that reminds me of a Cocteau Twins song I heard in a restaurant in San Francisco back in about 1990 when my parents were fighting and I kept putting money in the jukebox to drown them out. It was this little thing Bill did on the banjo and I know he wouldn't even begin to know he was playing these notes which reminded me why music saved my life but he did and I guess if anyone asked me why I was making this particular record with this particular musician it would be because of that.

We're hoping we will be done tracking in July. It's more fun than you know. And all the right easy, and just enough hard.
Cheers, BEML