I decided to try and go a day without saying a single swear word. 

EPIC FAIL! 

I think I got about an hour in and it all went downhill. It only ever comes to my attention that I swear so much when someone else that doesn't hang around the band much points it out. If any of you have seen our Splendour in the Grass "Hanging With" - you will see that my whole sentences are *bleeped* - To be fair the cameras were there for the whole day and just happened to use the footage where I was swearing the most. But I am guilty of it, not so much in general conversation but when I am explaining something, frustrated, angry you get the deal, screw something up eh. Okay so I am pretty bad. But I think it's just because those "swear words" have no meaning anymore. They are completely desensitized.

This is a very bad thing and makes you feel extremely bad when you are around someone that isn't used to the way we talk to each other. So tomorrow, I am starting a clean slate and am going to try to go the entire day without swearing. Everybody else is watching me, if I do go the whole day without swearing I will try and go another day without swearing and then hopefully a week. HA HA! Who am I kidding? But hey, I am going to try at least.  

Recording.

Is taking longer than we expected, but it's all well worth it. Everything is sounding just how we want it to, which is why it's taking so long. We are taking the time out to get the perfect sounds for our parts and constructing things very differently from the first album. You see, with the first album we had been playing those songs live for ages and ages and already knew them completely. This time around we haven't played these songs live and lots of things have changed. Instrumentation wise. I am playing octave chords a lot on guitar, which I am soooo not used to, but I am a firm believer in doing what is right for the song. I am usually all single notes but not this time around, the songs are more, hmmm how do I put this? Open? Hopefully it's not too long before you see what I mean. Taylor is recording violin right now actually as I type this and she is also recording viola parts. Finally the songs feel like they are nearly complete. Just don't want to rush and miss out on anything that could be better or sound better you know?

We leave this farm on Sunday and then head back to the Gold Coast to finish off bits and pieces, we can't stay here for much longer because there are people moving into the houses on the property for holidays and we have overstayed the time we were supposed to be here, which is sad. I would like to have gotten everything done here because it saves the hassle of moving. But if we have to move, we have to move. So will most probably be putting the finishing touches of the album at my house, in my living room. It is going to start an uproar of shit with my neighbours but oh well. Does it count if you swear in text? It does doesn't it? Yeah I think it does. Eh. Broke it again. Tomorrow is a new slate TOMORROW! 

So in all honesty I don't think we will finish tracking the album until another two weeks, but we will be mixing songs one by one in between. I am hoping for a single out in the next couple of months but as I said it's crucial that we just do this the right way and take some time to really get this the way we want it. There is the fear or "missing the boat" as I have said it before, but I don't think that's necessary if you genuinely believe in the songs, the record and what you are doing. Ultimately I want this to be the best it can be, we all do, so I am being particularly fussy and bossy. I am so tired though, I actually just want to crawl up and sleep in the princess bed and relax but I can't. I have so much more work to do before I can relax, which is fine but I cannot wait until I have copy of this album in my hands, it's been a slog since the beginning of the year and I think I have grown up so much more through the writing and process of this record and it is definately for the better. I feel as though I know myself again after coming home from tour. I think I am right where I should be at this point in time, that will change during the course of this record and it's "journey." You know how it is. 

Well just a brief update on how things are oh and HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRINCE for the 7th of July. 51 years old and I am still daydreaming about marrying him one day ha ha. I'm sick. Alright, I have so much work to do so I must leave you here. Hope you are all well and enjoying your school holidays (those of you that are on them at the moment) stay out of trouble and try to avoid drinking in the park as a means of fun. People don't like it ha. 

XXXX 

"Let's have some fun, this beat is sick, I wanna take a ride on your disco stick."

ALL DAY! Have you all seen her new clip? It's fucking spectacular. Also did anyone see what she wore at this years Glastonbury festival? INCREDIBLE. She was like a femme bot from Austin Powers her titties were on fire, literally. On an exciting note, I am going to see Britney in November! Oh yeah. I am mega excited. I hope she plays all of her older stuff and doesn't ignore it. I will lose my shit when she plays "Hot as Ice" I hope she plays it and "Freakshow." Those are so awesome. I heard some of the early demos from the Blackout album that were leaked and she sounded awesome like a femme bot on helium. 

So....today I have decided to have a bit of a day off. I am going to sing some vocals now and then not going to do anything for the rest of the day, I think I need to stay out of the studio for at least a couple of hours so that I can clear my head. I have a couple of things that I really need to do. We are a bit pushed for time and I think we are going to extend it hopefully. I want to leave here and have the whole album done you know? Like all the extra little bits and what not - I want them to all be done. I have one song to do guitars on, one song left and I can't finish it because the song isn't actually finished yet. I was going to just chuck this particular song but the rest of the band thinks we should definately use it, so I am going to try and fix it tonight or tomorrow night. Now we have pretty much moved on synths. And getting all the parts, putting it through lots of shit and getting the right sounds. They keys in the new songs play a big part, but the last thing I want is to have synths that sound mega electro you know? I mean there is going to be that electronic element to it yes, but I still want the synths to sound organic and a bit fucked up. 

I don't think clean synth tones work in these songs. I don't really like the sound of clean synth for our songs, you know what I mean like clean. It doesn't sit well with me. It's the same process as guitar tones, getting the synth to sound right. Re-amping a whole bunch of sounds, lots of fucking with switches and dials to make it perfect. I am a fucking freak when it comes to that shit, I won't stop until it's right, which can be painful and means that you lose so much sleep but it's worth it when you are creating exactly what you want. This place is so beautiful, I love that I can walk into the garden and pick fresh lemons for tea and fresh oranges for juice. It's amazing, the sunsets are stunning as well. On that note, I best be off. I have a lot of work to do and if I chill out on it, I am going to be angry at myself tomorrow. We'll see what happens though, I think I do need to chill out even if it is for an afternoon but we'll see.

XXX 

Hello Dears, 

Tracking is going well, we have about a week left in this studio and are using the time wisely by cracking down. I can imagine that when we leave here we will we disheveled and will have developed permanent bags underneath our eyes. Bed time has usually been 4am for some of us 5am and some of us have pulled all nighters and become totally delusional. But we put it on ourselves and chose to just press on and do things rather than sleep ha ha. Scary thing, my Mum is staying with us for a couple of days and the first thing she said to me when she walked in the house was, "Amandah does this house have a spirit in it?" - I knew this place was haunted. Anyway the day before we were talking to Gayle the lady that looks after the place and the office during the weekdays and she was saying that there is a milkmaid from many years ago that lives here and people that have stayed here and filled out the customer forms have reported her as well. Argh! Now you can imagine we are all freaking out, especially me and I won't dare to walk alone at night. My fears have been confirmed. 

Overall it has been a good week but to be perfectly honest, the past couple of few days have left a strange feeling in the air for me, I still can't believe that Michael Jackson died, it's so weird. I know most of you are probably "over" hearing about it but if you are uneducated about the importance of Michael Jackson then start learning. And I don't mean that in a condescending way at all. It's never too late to learn about Michael Jackson and discover his music. But if you don't know anything about him yet have the audacity to make fucked up jokes and stupid comments about him, that is something to think about. I only hope that from this, people that didn't know so much about Michael Jackson start to discover him. I'm not claiming to be an MJ expert but I do love his music and respect what he did. If you are "over" hearing about it you'd better get used to it because people are going to go on and on and on about this for months, that is something that is just going to happen, the tributes are going to start pouring in and there is nothing anyone can do about it. 

Moving on to happier news I guess :) The album is going better than I had imagined. Taking the time to get the right sounds, not rushing. Timmy is editing and comping drums so that I can track to them, I bet he feels like shit, probably hasn't slept for a couple of days, but it's all worth it. It's good that this house has three houses on the property we have a station for each house. The cabin is the Timmy's drum editing/comping room, then we have the bottom house which is where we have set up the studio stuff to record everything, then the top house where we chill out and sleep and stuff. We also discovered that what we thought was a "Rat Party" was actually a family of "Micro-Bats" which is exactly what they are. Tiny, tiny bats and they are SO cute. I feel better knowing that it isn't rat's squeaking and scratching in the roof and it's little cute bats. Have also made it halfway through the tracking process, only 4 songs left to track and then doing bits and pieces over the top. Very excite. 

Also for my birthday, Justin bought me a purple Hannah Montana guitar amp. Amazing right? We were searching for a DI on ebay and there were 10 watt guitar amps going for sale. They were Hannah Montana amps and I was like "Oh how awesome would that be if you have a wall of Hannah Montana amps on stage." Anyway today a package came for me and I opened it and it was a purple Hannah Montana amp, it is a Prince purple and has a woman on the side of it. Totally amazing, funny thing is that the clean tone on the amp actually sounds good. Everyone that works at this place is incredible. Such a nice family of people here and very pleasant to be around, which is the best atmosphere to have. I have to press on tracking and getting all edits from Timmy. I shall speak to you all soon! 

Much love. 

XXXXX 

R.I.P MICHAEL JACKSON. 

People will remember this day forever. 

You will remember exactly where you were when you found out. 

This is SO SO SO HUGE.

An amazing talent and a ground breaking artist. 

So much respect and admiration for him. 

XXXX 

Today I royally stacked it down a tiny tiny step. My knee is scraped and the worst part is I ripped my awesome tights! Of all the tights to rip these were the ones that I promised myself I would take special care of. Not fucking likely. I don't care about ripping my spandex tights, but my cotton lace pattern ones I am really annoyed about. I have been very careful these last few months you know, haven't jumped any fences that I could potentially get my tights caught on, haven't been drunk enough to fall over on the gravel, haven't even been slam dancing like a loser to Britney in my room (mainly cause I have to share my room with Taylor whilst at the recording house ha ha.) But this was a stack like no other, pretty epic if I do say so myself. 

I was about to leave the house to go down to the studio and I'm like "Okay, see you guys a little later," head for the door and straight to the floor, dropped my laptop and sat there for a while trying to understand what had just happened. The bad thing about it there was no instant reaction from anyone to make the pain funny, no-one saw me fall and no-one knew what happened until after a couple of minutes, so by that time the pain had already set in and it was past the point of being funny, so when people laugh at you after the pain has set in, it doesn't become funny it just makes you angry. If someone saw me and had have laughed like a maniac I would have forgotten how much it hurt and just basked in the aftermath of it all. But now, I can only think of a sore knee and ripped tights eh. Oh well, I make it sound like the end of the world, when in reality it would have probably looked amazingly hilarious. I walk with a bit of a limp right now, but I'm sure I'll be okay. 

So did some more guitars today and about to do some vocals. I just borrowed this amazing sparkly purple strat today and it is SO PRINCE! I think I am in love with it. Such a nice guitar, but have mainly been using my Rickenbacker and a Tele which is rare for me because I don't usually play Telecaster guitars. But have done Back+Forth, the guitar sounds really cute and tinkly and when you listen to it, it makes you feel like the guitar is close and being played in the room - which brings me to another thing, this house has the best room to record in. The room sound is dead - which means you can pretty much manipulate it how you want to, whilst a dead room isn't always good for recording this room is right for our record, which I am very pleased about. 

In other exciting news, I saw a 2m carpet snake today. It was crossing the path just in front of the steps to the side cottage where Justin and Ben are staying, they like to live in the roof, maybe they will one day eat the rat party. It's weird though, I've kind of never seen a snake in the wild ha ha, that sounds funny but it was the most beautiful colour. Oh and I totally forgot to mention that it was Timmy's 19th birthday was last Monday - we drank wine, talked shit and listened to 90's music is was tres exciting and good to be around the band for his birthday. Such a good kid, I love him to pieces. Anyways I am off, more guitars and vocals, then some more more and more. 

XXX 

I know I was talking about Twitter and all that but also just wanted to let you all know that. Our Bebo, Facebook, Website etc. are all being updated very soon. Currently our Bebo/Facebook/Twitter were made by other people and we are personally trying to get a hold of our log ins and get the pages off them. I didn't even know we had a Facebook or Bebo page until this page had links to them. So not cool. So I am messaging them just asking for our page back and our login, so we can keep it all up to date. Put new photos and all that stuff. There are so many points of contact and shit you need to man these days! Ha ha. But once they are updated, YES they are updated by us. What I am most probably going to do is use Myspace as the main update place and link this page/any blog from the other pages directing you to here or the official website. Everything will be orchestrated by us, there is no need for anyone else to do it, had I known they existed I would have done them myself anyway. Also if you haven't signed up to the mailing list and want to know extra information you can if you want, the link is on the side bar of our myspace page. I also write all mail outs and sometimes there are video blogs in there and show information, so it's not just some office pretending to be us, it's actually us...unless someone totally hacked it and starts writing whack shit then it's not. It might be on the off chance that I am hella delusional when I do it but chances are it wouldn't be. Besides, anyone who actually reads these blogs here would know if it was me or not. 

Okay just wanted to get that out and give you the heads up about it. It is raining like crazy here, I nearly fell into a puddle outside my front doorstep today. Spending this morning getting the drums edited and ready for everything to be tracked to. Sorry, just before I forget going back to previous topic, there are a couple of street teams for us floating around out there and a new UK one that was set up a couple of weeks ago. So by all means if you want to get involved in our UK street team the myspace address is - 

www.myspace.com/operatorpleaseuk

It is looked after by a lovely girl from the UK who messaged me about it. We do send out stuff and give updates there as well. So if you want to join then go for it or just have them as a friend on your page you can do that too :) It's just really about word of mouth and what not. It will have updates and what not on there but as I said if this is the place to come to if you want info. Even when we are on tour, I will blog when I get the time. Okay cool. I'll be honest though it can be hard blogging about things. I like to be very personal with my blogs and sometimes that can be totally difficult - cause if you are feeling shit you don't want to put that onto everyone that reads your blogs and also it gives fuel to people that want to bring you down - it's weird. I guess you just have to be yourself in everything you do and can't be scared of what people think of you. It took me ages to get used to people talking about me and the band without actually knowing us and all the rumours and false bullshit, all the bullying and nastiness that comes along with what we do. Which brings me to shedding some light on the situation. I honestly hope that none of the people that read this blog diss on other bands, or send hate mail or nasty comments or heckle at bands who's music you don't enjoy. Bottom line is it's not nice and it makes the people doing it look incredibly ignorant. Enough of that. 

Back to the rain. It hasn't stopped raining since yesterday - this house has a tin roof so it's kind of awesome but when it rains really hard you literally cannot hear a thing. Also in the studio part of the farm there are rats in the roof, they have a rat party at around 9pm every night. We figured that if you hiss at them they run along - if we didn't have a room microphone out here they could continue their rat party but because we have a mic out in the hallway picking up extra sound the rat party gets recorded. I'm still totally scared of rats but the idea of them doesn't freak me out as much as it used to and that is probably because of that movie Rattatouille. I know I'm retarded right? But the rats in that movie are awesome. So when they are having their rat party, I imagine it being like the rat party parts in Rattatouille. Okay have to get back to being bossy bitch in control room ha ha ha ha. I make that sound so bad but it's not as bad as it looks in typing. I hope that you guys are all well. I was just wondering also just as a last thought - What is your favourite movie as of late? Let me know yo. I need to keep my mind occupied in down time. Also I really can't wait for the new album to be heard, it is fairly different and a move up. It's just like a new slate, a new piece or art, a new adventure and I am excited for it to start again and I hope that you guys will come with us or can take something for yourself away from it. Thanks for the support and being interested in what I have to say. 

XXXXX Amandah. 

So just a heads up to anyone these - 

http://twitter.com/operatorplease

AND 

http://twitter.com/Operator_Please

are not us. So if you are them then can you please stop updating our page it's sort of embarrassing, considering there is no way IN HELL we would say something like - 

"Living the dream, rockin out in Byron!" 

I'm pretty sure we would never use words like "Rockin" "Rock out" "Livin the dream." 

That's just embarrassing. So any of them you come across definately not us. 

More likely to tell you to watch a movie about a girl with teeth between her legs.

Thanks xxxx. 

Yes, I need those pedals. Will email him now. Okay done. I just found out that apparently "Mink Pink" the clothing label have made a cape called "Operator Please Cape" which is amazing and I want to see it. So if any of you happen to be in a store with Mink Pink in it check for the cape cause I can't ha ha. But this made me mega excite and now I have to have one. Also things to be tres excite about - new Harry Potter movie, cannot wait. Yes I have to go and start doing vocals and guitars! Timmy is working on video updates just haven't had a hell of a lot of down time to edit - promise there will be something up as soon as we can, well if we get down time. Alright, hope you are all well! AND Dananananaykroyd are coming to Australia. They are playing Splendour in the Grass and a show at The Annandale in Sydney and East Brunswick in Melbourne - check them out. 

www.myspace.com/dananananaykroyd

And if you can make it to their show, you should really go. They are amazing live, have hilarious stage banter and are just all around good people. Have toured with many amazing bands and have quite a reputation in UK and only a matter of time before Australia catch on - some may have already. Don't I sound like a good little ass kisser? No, just showing support for our friends :) Oh and before I forget, I cannot believe I was nearly not going to tell you all. The other morning we were sitting around bored and checking what was on cable - Ashley switches over to the movie channel and next there is a movie called "Teeth" interesting. So he checks the movie info - 

"A young girl discovers she has a set of teeth between her legs when her highschool boyfriend forces himself upon her, this is where the carnage begins." 

WHAT? We ALL nearly died and decided we HAD to watch this movie. Life changing, life changing I tell you. It was almost as amazing as foreign movie "Killer Condom" - same thing happens literally. Totally gruesome and supposed to be a horror film but totally hilarious. If you can handle seeing penises chopped on the floor and amazing facial reactions, screen shots and close ups - then do it. I may get in trouble for posting this on here. Oh well - we laughed the whole movie. Remember it "TEETH." Alright sorry you may have been scarred graphically but had to share. I was so amazed that this movie existed. Super excite in a hilarious, sick kind of way. 

XXXXX 

Lady Gaga is NOT the only person to do "THE EYE" thing. I'm sure there are A MILLION photos of people doing the same shit. Jesus fucking christ - referring to our new press shot FYI. Not angry, looks angry in typing, just pointing it out. 

Thanks. 

XXXXX 

Helicopter - BLOC PARTY. The hardest songs are the older ones that are a bit hick diddle de diddle de you know? I also haven't rapped my head around the "hammer" notes, the ones you don't have to strum for eh. My hand is actually sore typing this.

Recording is going so well! I am really excited with how everything is sounding, all falling into place exactly how we want it. In 2 weeks time we will have completed new songs! I can't wait to get there. Studio is definately haunted. And I am scared to type that in fear of what is behind me and reading over my shoulder, okay I am psyching myself out now. It has also been raining and the cows are tripping balls. Mushrooms growing in their pats, no sight of dwarf cow, I hope they haven't killed it or eaten it. There are hardly any curtains in the house either and it is predominantly glass, so walking past windows late at night whilst being scared isn't fun. But it is all sounding like a treat. Anyways I am off to track guitars and sit in the control room and be a bossy bitch. Hope you are all well. 

XXXX