I'm sitting in the B-room at Transient Studios, trying to make myself invisible on the couch while the Jim, Eric, and Johnny Hats record their horn tracks on "Ain't Going Back." It's funny, I think that's been the first song every time we add a new instrument to the album...When we first went in as a band, Ain't Going Back was our warm-up track. When we recorded guitars, same thing. Vocals, ditto. And now horns. Wonder if it'll end up as the first song on the album.










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It's July now, and we've been at this since January 2nd. Well, on and off - at first we spent 9 straight days just laying down tracks, and since then it's been a matter of coordinating a lot of schedules and accommodating a lot of people, so it's been kind of slow going with a lot of empty space...until recently. In the past month, we've been chipping away at the album pretty steadily and now it feels like I've turned around and we're over the hump on a lot of these tunes. Pretty soon, we'll have just percussion and handclaps to add to a bunch of the songs and they'll be fully recorded...but not mixed.

You wouldn't believe the number of tracks laid down for each of these songs. Layers and layers and layers of vocals, extra keyboards & guitars...the idea being that we just record everything and carve the songs down when we mix them. Steve Gillis & Vijay Tellis-Nayak, our producers, amaze me on a pretty regular basis, with instant judgment calls and - even more impressive - endless supplies of patience and diplomacy. In a big band with a lot of strong opinions (and there are a lot), it ain't easy to manage it all. Steve and Vijay (or "Vijillis," as we call them collectively), along with Brendan, have been pretty awesome about making choices, and their choices seem to be leading to a really cool album. The rough tracks we're hearing are really exciting. And they freak me out sometimes too, with batlike hearing and attention to detail. We'll be listening to like 18 layers of vocals, and Steve will say "hold it - something's out of tune." And this will be something small enough that 5 other seasoned musicians didn't notice it after hearing it 5 times. Steve will pick one track, ask Stefanie to re-record it, and there's an audible improvement. I mean, that's fucked up, right?

Here's Vijay:




And then there's the backup vocals. My god. That's probably the biggest difference between the album and how we play the songs live. We knew we really wanted to dig into some cool backup parts when we recorded, but I never anticipated this.

Brandice Manuel (one of the backup singers, along with Taroniah Rice - you might've seen them at one of our Chicago shows) has been writing and singing some really fierce parts with Stefanie, and they're really bringing new life to these songs. Songs like AGB, I'll Get Down, and Before I Know are all a shitload more fun. Brandice has an amazing feel for the songs. It's gotta be in her blood - her grandfather, Charles Stepney, worked extensively with Earth Wind & Fire, and he co-wrote "Reasons."  We call Brandice "Sprinkles" because she's always sprinkling just the right flavor on our songs.

Here are Taroniah, Stef, and Brancice (left to right), backstage at our Schubas show from March...



And here are some random other shots from the recording process...







So there'll undoubtedly be another update before the album comes out, because we have a long-ass way to go. But bit by bit, this album is shaping up to be something else. We actually put together a video that shows a little more what it's been like so far...