Recording Bohemian Blues Mar 13, 2009

What started as a thought culminated into a plan that resulted in an amazing experience.  Bohemian Blues will be the record that is crucial to our discography and has set the pace for what we believe will be a very important record for the history of the band.

We left Los Angeles on November 4th 2008, en route to a performance in Tucson, Arizona - the very day Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America, taking the stage right after the inauguration speech. The next day, we departed for North Carolina where our album would be created in a building, once a bookstore, now converted to a drafty music venue.

The drive through most the country was exceptionally uneventful. In Little Rock we enjoyed some of the finest BBQ man has ever produced, and Nashville was a night of whiskey and drunken debauchery, as Jon chatted up a Canadian pop superstar and then proceeded to immediately return to our friend John’s house to blow chunks until the wee hours of the morning. When we finally did arrive in North Carolina, Jon (who had to drive the entire way due to me not having a valid license, and Ryan not knowledgeable on the stick) started to become ill. The weather, and frigid conditions of our “studio” eventually made us all sick. The heater was too noisy to run when tracking, so we had to wear large jackets and were forced to warm our fingers before takes.

The team we had signed up with was elected because of the unconventional recording methods and the sounds they produced. Virtually everything was tracked on quarter inch tape, and many of the instruments were done live and into room mics. It was all very rough, live and vibey takes. We experimented with percussion that ranged from conventional tambourine to unconventional storage locker. Ryan Gustafson (singer/songwriter) and James Wallace were the brilliant minds behind the process and we all just took it in. The philosophy was vibe at all costs. If the take was sloppy but had a character, that was the take we went with. Essentially, we learned how to record interesting-sounding records.

The importance to us was not neccessarily the resulting record, but the process we learned in making it. Within a month of returning home, we had purchased our own quarter inch tape machines, a tascam interface, microphones, preamps and all the other various requirements to track albums WITHOUT the overhead of professional (and in our case utterly unneccessary) recording studios and boutique gear. We even mixed the songs ourselves and paid only for printing and mastering. We wo’nt need to sell nearly as many of them to support ourselves, and it’s all going to go on iTunes. If anyone can suggest a purpose for record companies, for us, feel free. I’m all ears.

Tags: Bohemian Blues