Howdy, Compadres!
Some of you have asked why we haven’t been playing much in June, and then answer is simple: We’re recording! And dammit, we’ve given ourselves a DEADLINE finally, so it’s balls to the wall recordo-fest.
It’s really interesting to see how this record has morphed since we first started recording last October. It was originally gonna be a teeny sampler EP that we would simply give to venues as part of our press kit, and it was going to have a few originals and a few covers and that’s it. But then we figured we should make them a bit longer so we could sell them at shows, so we needed a new approach. So we scrapped about 95% the work we did in October and started up again in February all fresh and new. And now it’s June, and we’ve written and recorded some new songs since then… to the point where we have to think about which songs to leave off the CD. Not a bad problem to have, I suppose…
We’re also considering the different ways to release the CD. Yes, we want to have physical copies with album artwork because lots of people still like to hold a physical CD and read the lyrics, etc.. But other folks don’t care about the physical disc itself and would much rather just download high-quality .ogg, .flac or simple .mp3s of the songs like you’d do on Amazon or iTunes… but those sites take a big chunk of the revenue (which is reasonable, since they’re doing a good amount of work on our behalf). But it might be more profitable to rig up a system where we sell you a download code which you’d enter on a seekrit page on our website to download the album. The code would only be able to be used a few times (ideally), so we wouldn’t have to worry about people giving the code out to 900 of their friends for free… though really, if 900 people had a copy of our album we wouldn’t be upset, really.
Anyway, this is getting long without me saying a whole lot.
The upshot is: We’ve got some great stuff coming your way, and we’re really excited to get our music out to you. We expect to have CDs available by our gig at the Rockwood Ice Cream Festival on July 8th at 12:00-12:30pm. Depending on how that goes, we’ll probably schedule a CD release party at some point. Not sure when, but we’ll keep you posted.
Here’s a very, very, VERY tentative song listing, and these are NOT in order, and we probably won’t include all of these. We shall see. And who knows… we might write and record more tunes between now and July 8th. 🙂
ORIGINALS: You Were a Spider, Hole in Your Pants, Maybe You Saw It Too, Defender, Gravity, It Only Takes Two to Rock
COVERS: Major Tom (Peter Schilling), Kiss Off (Violent Femmes), Crazy (Gnarls Barkley in the style of the Violent Femmes), Crazy Train (Ozzy Osbourne), Rock of Ages (Def Leppard), Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen) (We are intentionally not recording Total Eclipse of the Heart.)
And then there’s the whole business of figuring out what the heck to title the thing. Maybe we’ll open it up to a vote…
Stay tuned for more updates!
Your pal,
Ji11