April 4, 2025
Today was back to the grindstone day in the studio! Now that we're through our March 30th show at Earp's (great turnout, thank you Fairfax!), we've got a few weeks open before we start rehearsing again for summer concerts and festivals.
We've already recorded the basic tracks for all of the “drum songs” we've been playing, so now we're back into the catalog revisiting, rearranging and polishing three songs that never really got as much airtime as everything else. Stephanie wrote “A Song for Pearl” for her grandmother at least 20 years ago, and she and Les have performed a lovely fingerpicked guitar duet version for many years. “Sailing” was Les's first original song in many years, and it's both incredibly catchy and a challenging arrangement at the same time. We did both during the 2010s some, and thankfully got a good live recording of both to use as a template as we bring them into the studio.
“Quiet Revolution” was one of our first co-writes, featuring Lisa on lead and Stephanie on secondary vocals. It's elaborately orchestrated even between the four of us, and we started co-writing easier songs that quickly bumped it out of our show. Topically it is ever more timely now, so we've been diving deep into deconstructing and reconstructing some of the basic rhythmic foundations as well as doing some lyrical work to really hone it into something fine.
We spent quite a few hours playing, discussing, experimenting and ultimately capturing the most up-to-date revisions on an iPhone before we called it a day. No pics to share because we were all using our phones for other stuff - lyrics, reference tracks, audio recording. These next couple weeks Les will start tracking his octave mandolin and banjo on several of the songs we've already “framed”, and vocal sessions probably not long after that.
But, we're set to head in and lay some tracks this coming Friday for “Pearl” and “Sailing”. We have both fairly well arranged for the basic tracks, but the arranging continues throughout the recording process, as we record other instruments and vocals, and ultimately sculpt away the excess and “didn't quite fit” bits into a finished mix. That's a fascinating process to share too, but we're a ways away from those blog posts just yet ;)
Stay tuned! Pics and maybe some video to come with this Friday's post.