Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The mountains are big and they all look fake

I would apologize for the lack of posts on here lately, but I don't feel sorry. It's been over 3 months since we finished tracking our record, and for the 8 months before that the record had consumed our lives. If you were following this blog, it's pretty obvious how much we were freaking out while making it.

"Listen, future So Many Dynamos record, i've been thinking about it, and i just think we need some time apart. What? No, no no no. It's not that i don't like you, in fact i like you a lot. It's just that things have gotten really intense and i just need some time to figure out what these feelings mean. No, it's not you at all. It's me."

So now we've had the time to separate ourselves from the process and get excited again. Chris has mixed 3 songs in whatever hours he's invented between working on his solo record and the new Death Cab record. We're stoked about the way they sound. On Monday, Alex Newport will start mixing 6 songs over the course of the week, and then we should have the album mixed and ready to master. Right? Right?

Wrong.

We've hit a bit of a snag with one of the songs we wrote at Tiny Telephone during our first week of tracking. The song just isn't "working" very well, and if you've ever made a record you know what it means to have something not "work" and it's impossible to describe but you know it must change or be eliminated in order to not have knots in your stomach every time you hear it or think about it. We even let Chris make a weirdo remix of this bastard song (genius working title: new song 2) but it feels like the song has turned into a our bastard stepfather: it doesn't work and it keeps giving us shit.

So we have 9 songs we're thrilled about and one that we're just confused about. It looks like we are going to have to write another song, drive up to Chicago, record it, send it to Chris and have him mix it. This proposition would have seemed ludicrous 3 months ago, but now that we've had time to think about what we've done it sort of feels like a second chance. The bastard song may work its way onto the record in some weird incarnation, but hearing the song as we intended it to be just feels like we peed on the carpet and somebody is making us put our nose in it so that we'll learn. Too dramatic? Probably.

Sooooooo we're a step backwards but it's a good step. Soon we'll be done with the first phase of having a new record, and then we get to figure out who's putting it out! Hurray!