6-8 Februrary 1998
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We go to Boston Soundworks with producer guy Tom Streit and lay down
basic tracks (drums, bass and rhythm guitar) and some lead guitar. We
come in with a list of fourteen songs, figuring we won't get to all of
them; in fact, we do get to all of them, and have some time left over,
so we record a one-take live-in-the-studio version of I Wish I Was Dead, vocals and all. It
turns out to be the best thing we've done all weekend.
Here's the song list. Keep in mind that a few of these will
probably fall by the wayside. Our apologies if we left out your
favorite; we tried to include all the big hits.
All of the Cool Girls
Another Person You Had Sex With
Chair
Everybody Knows
Hale-Bopp
I'm Still Around
I Wish I Was Dead
I Won't Find My Wife in This Bar
Make You Laugh
My Dinner with Laurie
Organism
Purple Yesterday
She's Gone
That's Okay
You Don't Love Me Yet
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28 Februrary 1998
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Back to the studio to record first passes at lead vocals for
everything. The idea is that we'll hear an approximation of the final
sound as soon as possible, so that I'll have a better idea of which
extra parts would sound good under it and which would be unnecessary.
Along these lines, we make a mixdown tape of what we have so far. It
sounds better than it has any right to. Amazing what a little reverb
can do!
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14 March 1998
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Second passes at lead vocals. The plan going in is just to patch over
a few rough spots, but my voice turns out to be in much better shape
than last time, so we end up just doing a bunch of them over from
scratch. Lead vocals are now all done for 12 of the 15 songs.
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10 August 1998
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We're not dead, really! We've had delays upon delays for various
stupid reasons. I'm just putting a note here so you'll know the
project is still alive.
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31 October 1998
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Yes, we're finally back in the studio. Hopefully progress will be
much more quick now. Today I added piano for a few songs (!) and put
in lead vocals for the songs that I wanted to have the piano part in
first. It's a secret which songs, though.
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14 November 1998
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Rhythm guitar additions and cleanup for five songs.
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21 November 1998
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Lead guitar cleanup, and adding some guitar bits that we originally
either left out or didn't have enough hands for.
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5 December 1998
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Lots and lots of backing vocals. I forgot there were this many of
them! I don't want to jump the gun, but I think we are just one
touch-up session away from being done with recording tracks, so we can
move on to mixing.
We made a cassette of the current state of the tracks, so I could
listen to it offline and see what final tweaks we need to make in the
next session. Well, I just listened to it, and I think I can safely
say that this album is going to be really good. I can't wait
until you all can hear it.
If all fifteen songs make it on the final release, it'll be around
47 minutes.
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12 December 1998
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Final tweaks. The next step is to mix down to two-track.
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29-30 June 1999
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Hey, we finally mixed it! It took us long enough. Mixing was done at
Supersonic. Listening to these songs for the first time in a
while, they sound pretty damn good. There isn't a whole lot of
production trickery, but the recorded sound is really nice and the
performances came out well.
Now we just have to master it, and get the artwork done, and get
the CDs duplicated...
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23 September 1999
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Just an update - we're getting the art done as we speak, along with
booklet design and everything. We did a band photo shoot a couple
weeks ago with our super photographer friend Trina. Progress is being
made. Will the CD be ready by our next show? I'll keep you posted.
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9 November 1999
Er, so it wasn't ready for the next show, for various reasons. But
today we mastered it, which means taking the final stereo mix and
turning into the actual sequence of bits that ends up on the CD -
sequencing, fades, compression, EQ, etc. Here is the final running
order:
Purple Yesterday
My Dinner with Laurie
Chair
You Don't Love Me Yet
Everybody Knows
I Won't Find My Wife in This Bar
I'm Still Around
All of the Cool Girls
Organism
Make You Laugh
Another Person You Had Sex With
That's Okay
She's Gone
Hale-Bopp
I Wish I Was Dead
Yep, we kept them all. Now we're working on getting the art done, take
two. Also, if you haven't yet noticed that we have MP3's available of
Organism and She's Gone, go here.
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9 May 2000
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I had avoided making little "it's almost done" updates here out of
paranoia that I was tempting fate, but now it is done, it's totally
done, all the CDs are sitting in my office and they look and sound
wonderful. Sorry it took so long. We hope you'll agree it was worth it.
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