Coaltown Ghosts

Brian and I just finished up a 3 day recording session, getting his bass lines down, and things are taking shape nicely.

The new CD will have 12 songs. Some will be a little bit more rock, some will be damn near poppy.  Equal amounts of both acoustic guitar and “face-melting” guitar solos. Eleven of the songs came from my solo days, the 12th was based off a backing track I did for a friend’s class project a few years ago.

The hard part was getting Brian and I together for a lengthy period of time to work on things, and that’s done. While I do have to redo nearly every guitar and vocal track, it’s not as big a deal since I can work on it whenever I steal a spare moment.

So that’s the latest. We’re both pretty excited.

Earlier this week, I finished the first song, “Drive All Night.”Aside from some final mixing/mastering, it’s completed.

I love traveling, especially by car. Back when I was in college (and gas was around $0.99 a gallon), I’d just pick a direction and drive. Cliche, I know, but there was just something about diving a town in which I’ve never been, and notice all the little things in it that its people don’t notice anymore.

I’ve been picking at things here and there. Positve reactions have been coming from those who have heard the rough cuts, but to be fair, most who have heard the early versions are family and friends.

I added some pics of my office/computer/gear on RockCreekMultimedia.com.

As for what I’m currently listening to right now, Sterophonics (check out this version of Twice As Hard that they did on “Later…” with The Black Crowes… awesome.) and of course Gomez. I’ve also have had weird cravings for The Presidents of the United States of America lately. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to listen to their eponymous album and remain in a bad mood. That just may faulty head wiring on my head, too.

I’m taking recording/editing inspiration from all types of places, some of them unusual–for me at least.

I still love to listen to John Mayer’s “Continuum,” especially his cover of Hendrix’s “Bold as Love.” The drums encompass the whole L-R spectrum, and when you hear the drummer go from hi-hat to snare to toms to floor toms, it moves across the track from right to left. It’s so well-layered.

I heard a couple of tracks Rilo Kiley’s “Under the Blacklight” and I had to pick it up. It’s kind of deceptive–in most songs, there aren’t a lot of pieces, but they still seem to fill up the space quite nicely. It’s simple and clean, without sounding incomplete. Quite the opposite, actually, in my opinion.

I’ve also been going over some of my favorite albums that will mostly likely sound more like our style of music. That includes Brother Cane’s first two albums, Kevin Gordon’s “Cadillac Jack’s #1 Son,” and Big Wreck’s two albums (and a little bit of Thornley’s “Come Again”).

Getting to a weird point in development. It’s the same point I reach most my projects. Whether it’s this project, home improvement, web design, or anything else, I’ll go over everything again and again, chasing a perfection I’ll come nowhere close to reaching. By the time I get a good grasp on things, enough time has passed where all of a sudden, a completely new way to do things pops up.

This project started out, basically, mostly as a sonic time capsule for my son. As I was growing up, I remember my dad playing guitar, my maternal grandfather playing guitar and I was just so happy just to watch them do this that I really didn’t pay any attention to what they were playing, their playing style. The opportunities are so rare nowadays, sometimes I wonder if I’ll get a chance to take that part of it in.

As I was a hack coffeehouse musician in another “life,” I had this original material that I’ve collected over the years, and I had been wondering over the past few years–when the boy is my age, will he have the same wishes?

I can’t deny there’s a little bit of nostalgia motivating me as well. When I first sat down to start recording, some of the original songs are wholly or partially based on songs I wrote 10, 12, 15 years ago. Hearing these songs takes me back not only to the subject matter of the songs, but the time that I spent writing and performing them.

But now I’ve got a new batch o’ songs emerging in my head–a little more mature, a little deeper (if I’m even capable of depth. That remains to be seen). The first of which I hinted at in my previous post, a song called Overshadowed. Once you get out of Chicagoland, if you take any two-lane highways at all, you’re bound to come across weird forks in the road, or maybe a spattering of houses that looks like it may have been a town at some point. In this time of population explosion and urban sprawl, it seems impossible that something as seemingly static as a town can die out, but just like everything else, they do.

Geography like that fascinates me, a sad pathetic fascination to be sure. What causes them to die out? In 100 years, what will people see when they drive down your main highway? That’s basically what I based the song around, and oh yeah, the name Coaltown Ghosts, that Brian so graciously allowed.

There’s more in me, and how much will make it onto the release is yet to be determined. But what is coming out so far has got me excited. So I just have to breathe in, breathe out, and focus on what’s in front of me. Anyway, there’s a little piece of where my sleep-deprived head is at.

Have a great and safe holiday weekend, I’ll be spending mine seeing one of my favorite bands, Gomez, at the Taste of Chicago. It’s been 2 years since I’ve seen them live, and I can’t wait.

As expected, recording/production has resumed. I recorded new vocals for “Drive All Night” last weekend, and this weekend I’ll be chopping that up, as well as Brian’s bass lines from an earler session. In a perfect world I may re-record the guitar and keyboard and a good portion of the song done.

Well, things are progessing rather slowly on the recording front. I caught a cold in December, and wound up coughing into March. It was long enough to mess up my voice bad enough that it couldn’t be recorded.

Why not see a doctor, you ask? Because I’m a man in my 30s. It’s part of my genetic makeup, much less my right, not to do so.

Still, the songs are looking good. “Bird in Hand” sounds like our best song yet, and we have a “new” track that may make the release (only one or two songs are a definite lock at this point), “Overshadowed.” The backing music actually came from a track I did for an old college friend’s project in one of his video-game-building classes (I don’t know the technical term for such a course). I wrote some lines inspired by the subject of our project name, and it seemed to fit pretty nicely. If I ever had an artistic bone in my body, it’ll come through on that song.

Anyway, my voice is coming back around, and provided I stop myself from singing along with Chris Cornell or either of his bands, and keep myself away form my sister’s Xbox and Rock Band, work will pick up in June. Which is about as long as I can stand to put it off. I’m itching to get back at it.

Until then, I’m going to keep driving Brian nuts with my barrage of questions over e-mail. I pepper him with some intricate question about the most benign of details, or dump an self-insecure-laden panic attack in his inbox twice a week it seems. Someday, perhaps, I’ll take a deep breath and actually heed his constant mantra of “no limits, just rock.”

Here we go. They’ll be a few new twists, and more frequent updates as we climb back in the saddle to finish this thing off.