This year has been a whirlwind of productivity so far!  My buddy Phil Taylor (from Future Leaders of the World/Machina) was going to be around upstate NY for a few weeks in January.  I asked if he’d be up for lending his vocals to a song for my upcoming CD.  I thought he’d sound great on “Status Quo”, which is one of the more “grungy” tunes I’m working on, so I sent him the tune and he dug it.  We spent a weekend recording and working on a couple new songs, too.  The guy’s got a really powerful voice, and I’m psyched about how great these tracks came out.  He sang the harmonies on Status Quo and came up with a few new parts of his own.  We worked pretty late into the night Saturday night and called it quits around 3am or so.

At around 11 Sunday I got up and listened back to the tracks we did the night before.  Stuff sounded great.  I picked up my guitar and was working out parts for a new song.  I had a verse and a chorus written and was trying out an idea for a bridge.  Phil woke up and came into the room and said “What was that you’re playing?  Play that again.”  I told him it was a bridge for a new song I was working on.  He told me he thought it’d make a good verse instead.  He then proceeded to sing a real cool vocal line over that, and a new song was born!  He picked up a guitar and came up with a prechorus and chorus pretty much on the spot.  He even had some of the first verse lyrics written within a few minutes.

We spent the afternoon finishing the lyrics together and arranging it, and then got to recording it.  We didn’t finish until just about 5:15am.  That night, I got drums programmed, a rhythm guitar track recorded, Phil’s vocals recorded, and he wrote/played a guitar solo, too.  In the week or so since then, I added bass guitar, sang some harmonies to it, and rounded out the guitar tracks.  It sounds huge.