...blah blah lemon-soaked napkins. I forget the exact quote, alas.
I was watching a video of the concert we played last summer at EWALU, and I noticed we referred confidently to the CD we'd be releasing that winter. Which is something we've been doing for a while now - I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure we've been referring to the upcoming CD in "any time now" sorts of terms for a few years now. Certainly we've been working on recording it for at least that long.
And that's the reason for our misplaced confidence, I think - we've been working on recording it for a matter of years, and we're not used to that being a long process. We recorded Whisper of Wind in an evening, Second Whisper in a long day at This Here Studios in Arnold's Park, and Folksinging over a couple of long days at This Here Studios in Strawberry Point. New disc (I've been using Fourth Whisper as a working title) has eaten up easily a week's worth of days in the studio, and we're at best halfway done. There are a couple of reasons for that.
First, "in the studio" for Fourth Whisper means recording in my new (and still being developed) home studio. So instead of having Rich Colligan's nicer studio equipment and significant experience and expertise at our disposal, we're figuring things out as we go, and that takes quite a bit longer. We've scrapped entire sets of tracks as we've figured out ways to make them sound better.
There also isn't a clock running and no $45/hour fee for studio time, so there's much less incentive to work quickly and minimize unproductive time (and we're very good at maximizing unproductive time, left to our own devices), and less reason to call an only-okay take good enough and move on. I like Second Whisper quite well, but every time I listen to it I hear things I'd have done differently, given more time. An entire day on each song is much more usual in the larger world of recording than the 13-songs-in-10-hours pace we kept for Second Whisper. Tying into that is the fact that we're very familiar with the music we're recording right now - we've been playing some of these songs live for years, so we have a clear idea of how they should sound and we're unforgiving of anything that doesn't quite match up.
Still, as has been pointed out, we're badly off our pace. Whisper of Wind was released in 1996, Second Whisper in 1997, and Folksinging in 1999; our first 21st-century disc is a bit overdue.
No worries, though. I'm sure we'll have it done in early fall.
3 comments:
Want to join my countdown? I'm at 106.
I feel obliged to point out that we also released Lord, Look Down in 2002. Yeah, most of those songs were re-releases, but so was much of Second Whisper, technically.
Then there was our ill-fated foray into electronica, entitled Kando is Tribe, No Tribe...
To me, the word verification thingie this time reads, "Iowa City Box God." (icbxgd)
"early fall" 2006?
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