So, what with one thing and another, yesterday found roughly half of Red Eye Dawn (which is to say, Jim and myself, with a few supporters) parked at
Amerisound, deep in the wilds of western Columbus. Despite all my years of nebbish rock star fantasy pretention, actual studio recording is something with which I've never had any experience at all. I'm fully aware that rock bands often record albums, break up, drink themselves into a stupor, reform, fire their bassist, argue like spoiled toddlers on crystal methamphetamine, and hire prostitutes from whose tits are snorted massive amounts of cocaine, and that the recording studio has long been depicted as the typical venue for these activities to occur. I've just never actually done it myself.
We booked four hours, under the James-given impression that he and I would be able to lay down basic tracks for six to eight songs by virtue of having our shit together and being able to rocket through them. From the outset - even knowing absolutely nothing about what goes on in a recording studio (as evidenced by the previous paragraph) - I held the viewpoint that we might, with an intense amount of effort, be able to scrape through three or four. I'm not inherently prescient - I just come equipped with a heaping helping of the the sort of pessimism that any IT professional develops in lieu of being found wandering the streets at 4 in the AM wearing only a cockring and the blood of a golden retriever - but we got two tracks pretty fully realized and a quick and dirty rough demo of a third. So as much as it befits me to be humble in this situation, I totally fucking called it.
What follows will largely be read by anyone who knows me in real life as pompous and self-aggrandizing, so if you're one of those people who likes it when I'm quiet and unassuming then you'll probably be wanting to skip to the end.
Somewhere in between recording the basic junk tracks and doing the requisite overdubs of vocals and guitar, I found myself left with the impression that I'm pretty goddamned good at this whole music thing. No, really. I've had word from no fewer than three people that the recording engineer, upon hearing my first couple of takes, was heard to exclaim something to the effect of, "Jesus Jim, where the hell did you find this guy? He's like a machine!" After some careful checking I established that he was referring to my ability to sing the same vocal line more or less the same way each take, as opposed to positing that I'm possessed of about as much soul as Madonna's vibrator, so that's all right.
Similarly, when it came time to lay down my guitar tracks my apprehension was equally mercifully short-lived. While I'm a middlin' fair guitarist, I've never been very good as a guitar technician. The only other time I'd ever attempted to record anything I spent hours fiddling with pedals and knobs and stuff to achieve what sounded to my ears as the perfect guitar tone, which contrived to sound on tape like Luciano Pavarotti taking a watery shit through the valves of a rusty trombone. Therefore, I figured the scant bit of time spent in Jim's basement twanging away and trying to pick out the niceties of my guitar tone through the high-pitched whine of onrushing tinnitus were probably going to yield a similar result. Oddly enough, the result sounds every bit as good as I'd hoped - which is sufficient evidence in my book to support my belief that not only is there a God, but apparently He's a Duane Eddy fan.
As for the songs themselves, they were shockingly well-received. The first number, 'Tennessee', is a mildly folky mid-tempo Jim tune with a strong country influence...though when Dan the engineer got through with it it sounded like America, which is not so much a negative as a heart-stopping "holy shit" kind of observation. After spending almost an hour putting down the basic tracks, I was allowed into the control room to have a listen and my first thought was that they'd gotten someone else to record our song. Y'know....someone who actually sounded good. Somewhere around the point where Dan mentioned shipping the tune off to a guitarist he knows in Memphis, I found myself settling into the notion that we are not pissing around here - we, the aforementioned recursive bandname, are making an actual record, and it is going to be something of which we can be very, very proud.
The other two songs are ones that I'd written sometime around 2000, but never done anything with because I didn't like the lyrics. A Jim-assisted rewrite later, we're working them into the repertoire and I'm very happy. I was incredibly nervous going into the basic tracks for 'Sadie', partly because it's kind of a 180 from 'Tennessee' - from mellow faux-country to more aggressive post-punk is a bit much for me, and I wrote the thing - but mostly because I always have this everpresent fear that everything I do is actually shit and I just haven't figured it out yet. After bashing through two takes of rhythm guitar and many takes of backing vocals, I looked sheepishly up and saw James with the biggest, fattest, turd-chewingest grin I've ever seen on his mug. Whingeing pussy that I am, I almost burst into tears. I've always been very proud of 'Sadie', but to find out that apparently everyone else also wants to line up and let it spunk on their faces one by one is a very soul-affirming thing. It pleases me very much to think that a song that I'd always feared was a mite too complex and dense to be really catchy is pretty well already designated as our first single. (So says Jim, and I can't think of any reason to argue.)
The final tune is called 'Party of One', and though we really didn't have time to do more than take a quick run at demoing it I'm convinced that it will be a jaw-dropping song once it's properly put together. As I mentioned above, it's kind of a sister tune to 'Sadie' because I wrote it about the same time and then pretty much threw it away because the lyrics were painfully clumsy. Twenty minutes of Jim-scribble has turned it into a very serviceable song, with a coda that I wouldn't feel stupid singing in front of an army of fans waving cigarette lighters. The song got a lot of compliments from everyone present, which brings me to the observation that
Godwin's Law could really use a corrollary regarding the comparison of original songs to The Beatles. It's incredibly flattering, but come on guys - you're not fooling anyone.
On the whole, the experience was nothing like what I'd feared and everything that I'd hoped (Christ, that sounds pretentious). The half-jokingly expected squabbling, hookers, and intoxication were thankfully nowhere to be found, and somewhere in there my burgeoning confidence took yet another giant leap skyward. We've already got time booked in the near future to have another go, which brings me to reiterate a point I made earlier. We are making an honest-to-god rock record, and all indications are that it is going to be very, very good.
