Here in the District...

Greetings to you and yours and from us and ours.

Here we are in our nation's capitol, ankles-deep into tracking our new full-length at Silver Sonya Studios, in Arlington, VA. Drums are in the bag on 5+ songs (Call It Casual, You and Me, Madly..., 24th, In A Bed of Scissor Arms, New Moon, A Good Son), and we're a couple hours away from wrapping up our first night of tracking. But not everything has gone so smoothly...

(dramatic pause)

Friday night we stopped off at Earlham College in Richmond, IN, to play a house party with a couple local bands - both of whom ripped through energetic sets and had us totally psyched to keep up the night's momentum. We opened with "I Used To Dream About Bridges", which had the packed room bouncing around and heating things up, setting up "Call It Casual", which banged up until the second verse, when we were rudely interrupted by the arrival of the po-lice. The minors split out the back door, and everyone else fought for their right to party while the officers wandered around carding kids and explaining why people can't be on the front porch drinking because that's public intoxication. Disagreements abound and three arrests later, the house show - and party - is officially over.

Saturday brought a different kind of show entirely, opening up a show at a D.C. dive bar for a friend-of-a-friend and a couple local bands. The crowd (who mostly showed up after we finished) was a bunch of young(ish) professionals out to get loose and socialize (or maybe "socially network"?), who probably wouldn't have paid much attention to our set anyway, seeing as they didn't seem to care a whole lot about the acts they (presumably) came to see. All that aside, we got to play for Devin, one of the engineers at Silver Sonya, who enjoyed our set and got to formulate some recording ideas for the week to come.

Our drive to the condo we rented was a little (well, no, very) intimidating, as we basically rolled straight through the ghetto at 1 a.m., ending up on a small inner city dead end, at the end of which sat our condo. Not really having any bearings as to where we were, and fearing that our surroundings might be the high-crime-rate type, it was night spent worrying about our gear in the truck.

The next day brought relief (our gear was fine), and a trip through some really cool restored neighborhoods near downtown D.C. (and actually really close to our condo) and on down to the Eastern Market to rummage through a bunch of cool vendor tents. Later that day, we finally got to set foot in the studio - loading all our gear in and getting the room arranged and mics placed.

Which brings us to today, the first day of tracking, which has gone tremendously well and is about to draw to a close. We're loving the way everything is sounding, we're loving the guys here (Devin, Nick, TJ and Chad are greater than great), and we're so psyched about the rest of the week. It looks like this record is going to be something we can be really proud of, and hopefully something all of you really want to listen to. Over and over again. Forever.

Cheers,
GAH