"We're Painting With Sound!"

Album Progress Report

So the recording is mostly done. And now, the work begins.

Vibes, Mr. Cream and I spent three days at Lakehouse Studios in Asbury Park, New Jersey, doing drums, bass, vocals, acoustic guitar, and piano, and what we in the punk world call “gangs”.

What are “gangs”? Well, for the uninitiated, they are gang vocals, this extremely silly portion of punk recordings where you get a bunch of dudes in a room and have them shout along to some portion of the songs. Except that for us, the shouting often involves singing a polka or making the noises that drowning sailors make. Some guys responded to my call for singers, on Substack, and we had no idea how it was going to go. Turns out: they were fantastic. Here they are with some of the rest of the band:

They kicked ass. It was awesome. Even drowning sailors would be envious of how realistic their portrayal was.

After taking care of the big studio stuff, we retreated to my newly constructed Shed of Destiny, which I’d spent days soundproofing and echo-proofing and wiring up. The three vocalist/diddlers, Jungle Jim, King Louie and Pauly Shoreman, came roaring out to my place north of the city and spent hours and hours and hours and hours sitting in front of shiny expensive new mics and painstakingly crafting each part. We spent so much energy doing this in an enclosed space that we started to go a little nuts, and after every little change or edit we’d say, in a clownish, sing-song voice, “We’re painting with sound!”

And I’ll repeat, the reason we had all these hours and were able to do this is because of the paid subscribers to this substack, who helped me to build the studio and buy the mics, so that we could record in a relaxed way without worrying about a studio hourly rate or schedule. Thanks folks!

And I say this with the utmost sense of excitement: the horn player from Polkacide sent some horn parts for the album. This is like Lady Gaga getting guest vocals from Madonna. It is huge.

So why do I say “the work now begins”? Because there is mixing. Mixing mixing mixing mixing mixing mixing mixing MIXING. Because for some fucking reason I like to start bands that have up to fifteen different instrumentalists and members on each song and they all must be delicately blended and purified and cleansed of their evil juices. Because I couldn’t just start fucking grungy indie-folk bands like everyone else where there’s one song with a guest ukelele player. And so, with this combined with being a control freak, I am condemned to a process that literally takes over my life for weeks on and and which turns me into a crazy person obsessively checking test mixes in cars and living rooms and headphones until I hate the songs so much that I never want to hear them again.

GO AWAY, MIXING. GO AWAY.

But the schedule is coming together and it’s looking like a September/October release is totally do-able. The album is of course going to be called Painting With Sound. Lol. And paid subscribers YOU get a preview video of the guys rocking out in Shed of Destiny, playing one of the tunes that might make the final cut…