Check it out! The First Annual Back to the Light Spring Turnout will be Saturday, May 21, at Crosstown Brewing Company. 3-8 PM, free, all ages. Music by The Subteens, Jeremy & the Drip Edges, J.D. Reager, Loose Opinions and The DownSprouts.
In the meantime, we’ll be practicing …
Here I am, picking up five copies of our test pressing from MRP earlier in the week. (Also had the opportunity to catch up with Catrina Maria, which is always a pleasure.) I’m pointing to a line on the sticker that says, “For Your Approval.” As I mentioned elsewhere, that’s a much better title than we came up with. A much better title than up with we came? Stupid preposition …
And here we see the secret message in the runout groove, inspired by a line in one of our songs – and Mr. Bond’s enthusiasm for said line.
Finally, here I am (not pictured) with Back to the Light’s J.D. Reager (not pictured) at the Memphis Listening Lab, blasting our test pressing. Good news, bad news: it sounds great and we are good to go for completing our order; unfortunately it’s not likely to happen until the end of July.
Stay tuned!
It probably doesn’t seem like it, but much has been happening the last month or so. A new album requires a lot of behind-the-scenes hard work by a lot of talented people.
After a few rounds of notes, engineer Matt Ciani finished his killer mixes on March 1, and then producer J.D. Reager sent those to Jacob Church for mastering. Masters came back March 7 sounding amazing, so we set the wheels in motion for vinyl production at Memphis Record Pressing.
Vinyl masters were handed off last Friday to Jeff Powell at Take Out Vinyl to cut lacquers. Next up, a test pressing!
I should also mention that I’ve been working with graphic designer Ronnie Lewis for cover art. He tells me we’ll have something to look at later this week. I’m excited!
We’re mixing now, which is the fine-tuning part of recording an album. How loud should the drums be, where in the mix should background vocals be panned, how many songs should include the count off? We don’t know either!
Tune in to see how little we can remember from our past. Just kidding, we cover a lot of ground! If you don’t do Spotify, you can also listen on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.
As planned, we finished recording the new album Sunday at Envision. Left to right, that’s John “Bubweiser” Bonds, producer and referee J.D. Reager, Jay “Don’t Call Me Ty Burrell” Hines, engineer and lineman Eric Wilson, and Yard-Rakin’, Soul-Shakin’, Money-Takin’, Godforsaken Mark Akin.
Come for the aerobics, stay for that amazing room sound. Here we are recording some background vocals.
And one final listen through of all 11 songs to make sure we didn’t miss anything. You may be asking yourself, why the ladder? It’s actually a very necessary part of the process, as you can’t hear the high notes without it.
Next up, mixing the songs.
Check it out! I recently appeared on the Back to the Light podcast chatting with J.D. Reager about our new album’s progress and a few other things. If you don’t do Spotify, you can also listen on Stitcher or Apple Podcasts.
D’oh! I knew I was going to fall behind on the recording updates. We’ve been getting back at it the past few weeks (newest new working title, Quietly Noisy Relaxed Intensity) with the delightful Eric Wilson as engineer and Envision filling in for the studio.
Last weekend Mr. Bonds cut percussion at his house and I recorded some background vocals at mine. It’s really starting to feel like we’ve turned the corner on finishing these songs. Mixing approaches, and we’re hoping to be done with all recording by December 5. We shall see …
Back to Graham’s for vocals the last few days starting Sunday, October 10th. Not much to report, other than this guy is still crushing it. We’ve got lead vocals on eight of 11 songs!
Let me take this opportunity to feature one of the many conversation pieces in this studio. How ’bout that Memphis city seal? You can see it over the door in the above photo, but here’s a closeup.
Seriously, how cool is this?