2” WIDE & 2500’ LONG

We are recording. We are “in the studio”. I’m afraid to jinx it by speaking it (writing it?) aloud, but Sinners, Repent! is definitely recording. In a big room, on 2” tape, with an engineer who knows what he’s doing. To me, its terrifying – this band has been perpetually slowed by the kind of hurdles that slow any band, though we do seem to encounter more of them.

Perhaps the most consistent hurdle is my own tendency to declare recorded efforts insufficient and unreleasable. This has long been the case with SR! starting with my own home demo recordings, then the first recordings that Sean Stevens and I did off-hours in a voice-over booth in Los Angeles, then the recordings done by Greg Klaiber and the NC all-star band in Durham, and up to the full-band home-recordings that we painstakingly slogged through last summer. I’m still trying to figure out how we want to press and distribute that, in an age when CDs are on the wane, but audiophile vinyl+digital download is still too expensive for us. (Plain ol’ MP3s are kind of gauche, but nonetheless currently downloadable here!) I personally have no confidence in our ability to sell many records at all, which is probably a bad attitude to have. One of those unsolicited “10 Tips to Make It! in the Music Industry” magazines (that have inevitably found me at every address since I was 18), would probably tell me that first and foremost we need to believe in ourselves. Its not that I think these songs are crap; its just that empirical evidence is against us. We all have lots of experience of pressing up piles of CDs and vinyl records that now clog the closet space in my home. I’ve thinking we’ll press up about 100 copies of each release we do, and subcontract the covers to summer camps’ arts and crafts programs (though kids tend to prefer woodshop).

At my place, I have a computer, a couple of monitors, and a modestly-priced condenser microphone. I also have an extremely cheap mic-pre/compressor left over from my days with a Tascam 424 four-track. Since 2006, when I bought a used copy of the recording program Logic on eBay, this has been my recording set-up. I have something like 60 songs or slivers of songs that I’ve recorded – which sounds impressive, except that lots of those songs are 30-90 seconds of guitar and some vague mumbling on my part that approximates a melody. But sometimes it yields some decent recordings that I’m proud of and which, in some cases, hold a dearer place in my heart that their full-studio counterparts. Here’s a few home-demos that have run the gauntlet of my procrastination and ended up with guitar, vocals, percussion, and near fully-formed identity…. Kill the Pain | The Life of Girls | Julia (I Can’t Sleep)

All my old bands recorded in studios – or at least project studios generally equipped with the most important piece of equipment: an intelligent engineer – and our recordings were absolutely dictated by time and money. And frequently it was more fun than the hair-pulling that my home-recordings have produced.

So for now I'd like to say “we’re in the studio”, and I think I will, even though the phrase implies that we’re there everyday, hunched over the board, adding toy whistles and finger cymbals until everything is just right. So yeah, we’re in the studio. We received rough mixes this week and we’ll probably begin figuring out exactly where the finger cymbals go and which outfits we should wear to make our songs sound their best.