Conrad Blog:

What I'm Up To Lately

Well, I've been posting on my blog slightly more regularly, *that's* for sure. It might not always be inspiring, but at least its there.

A few days ago, I packed all my recording gear into my car and drove to Greenville to record my friend Jakob Eckeberger's new band live. Jake and I were in Amnesty Letters together back in the day, along with three other brilliant persons. Jake's new band is a blues thing - which is unexpected and very cool. Chris Matetic from Lexington (RIP) drums on it, and Jake's wife Katie sings. She... rips it. She's freaking ridiculous-good. I didn't catch the name of the bass player, mostly because I'm socially awkward.

So on friday I left for Greenville after work. Later that night, a bunch of us went out to Pokey... (High-school friends, pokey is a 24-hour truck stop about 10 minutes away. It was/is typically the only food place open at the crazy hours of night we'd get hungry.) It was pretty good. I ate some Chicken Fingers for Kate, who regretably was off being her own person in Boston or something.

Early start on saturday - 10am. Building was locked until 11 am (oh, Greenville, how I don't miss that at all), setup until 12. We're tracking live, everyone playing in the same room at the same time, really loud. Everything's bleeding into everything else's microphone, and its great. jake has to work at 3:30, so at this point I'm thinking we're gonna be in a rush. Once I got everything set up, I didn't even bother listening to it to make sure it sounded okay - just got levels, tried to figure out the songs on piano, and hit record. A few hours later, we had knocked out the three songs we wanted too, plus a fourth (A cover of "Chain of Fools") just for fun. I remember in Amnesty Letters that it took us about 6 months of steady work to record a 4 song ep, so it was super-refreshing to knock out four songs in less than 3 hours. I needn't have worried about the time I guess. Tons of fun. I pretty much botched all the piano though. Ha.

After that came overdubs - which reminded me why studio work takes so long. Nobody playing overdubs really has any idea of what they want to play for them, so you spend about half an hour trying to come up with something for the part, figuring out exactly what was played before, that sort of thing. For just a few little overdub parts, it took us until about 12:30am. then teardown and stuff while tired, I got to bed at 2. The stuff sounds pretty great though.

Sunday was a low-key day. Church in the morning (I miss St. Pauls), then potluck (I miss St. Pauls), and then an episode of Firefly. Hung out with the Katie and the Caitlin mostly. Then I went home. Long boring drive. I was pretty much the saddest ever. Being back at Greenville was strange, leaving my friends again was heart wrenching. Unfortunately, this stage of life is where we know we have to cut the veins from our heart and transplant it somewhere else. And then we do it. Good God.

Guess I can't follow that very well. I put some piano in some of my tunes. It was good to see people again.

Oh and I'm going to be starting a thing called "new song monday." Perhaps inspired by Dan's NaNoWriMo effort, every monday for the forseable future, i'll post lyrics and a demo to a new song I'm working on. Please leave comments. After there are several songs up there, I'd like to have people vote on them. Perhaps the winners will be the ones I end up recording. Good idea? Bad idea? I dunno, perhaps you will tell me.