Day 1

After 2 break-downs, 2 tow truck rides, and 2,000 miles (900 of them without air conditioning) we arrived yesterday morning at Tiny Telephone. We were greeted with hugs from Mr. Walla and met John Vanderslice (sweet dude and TT owner) and Jay Pellicci (excellent engineer who helped us/Chris out on the first day).

First days are always weird. Lots of trying out different guitars and amps and pedals and keyboards and mics and cymbals and changing drum heads. We spent most of the day working on drum sounds, and then listened to "Tired of Sex" by Weezer in the control room and essentially started over. At the end of the day, we had everything sounding pretty great and started working on the first song.

What has been personally exciting for me thus far is that we've been loosely following Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards on our arrangements. These are cards with simple messages like "Ask your body" and "Don't be afraid of cliches" meant to help when you get stuck on something in the studio. It's a pretty fun way to think and we haven't been totally stuck on anything yet.

Today is REALLY the first day of actually working pretty hard and playing a ton. QUESTION: If we were to put up the instrumental demo of one of our new songs, and the lyrics but without any reference to the melody of the song and did "So Many Dynamos blind karaoke" where anyone who reads this blog can record their own vocals to it and send it in and we'll post the mp3 online, would anybody actually do it? We thought it'd be fun, just wondering.