An Obama button, on us.

Not only are we telling you about it, but we've made a donation to help fund them. Get your free Obama button from MoveOn.org.

A bunch of Anniversary

We celebrated our 4th anniversary a few days ago. So yes, we're older looking than in our picture. I have a beard, circles under my eyes, probably less hair, but I've feared I've been losing that since I was in elementary school, a thought which I curiously share with Chris Martin of Coldplay.

We cashed out a lot of retirement savings. It's kind of a strange situation. It has to do with the Social Security Administration. The SSA is an odd place. I caught an elderly security guard checking out a middle-aged woman's derrière, and then his eye, after which he watched me like a hawk. There was a kid there too that smelled up the waiting room, and then we shared an elevator with afterwards. He didn't have to explain it, we're modest people, but he blamed it on a BK Croissandwich anyway.

The long and the short of it is that while all this money is passing through my hands, most of it just going towards our mortgage, Danielle gave me the anniversary present of a Gretsch Double Anniversary. It's a cool guitar. Hopefully you'll hear it soon, as we start a new round of recording a week from tomorrow.

Here's the very guitar, a shiny Cadillac Green 1964 Double Anniversary:

Poverty is sort of the new theme.

I started a photo album about it on myspace, but it's going to take some time.

Cleveland has been named America's poorest major city of the year several times already this century.

I used to teach in the inner-city, I pretty much went crazy from watching myself become a failure there. The district on a whole only graduates about 1/3rd of it's students.

I taught music. I remember picking up a student who wouldn't otherwise be able to make it to a performance, three kids in the apartment, not a bedroom for any of them, nor beds or mattresses. They slept on blankets on the floor, maybe towels.

It's a political problem, and the solution doesn't begin with thinking everyone should pull themselves up by their bootstraps because it's the American way. Not every start is equal, or remotely similar in quality.

The American way shouldn't be to allow people to live in projects like this:



We need to do better.

Drums and Bass

We finished tracking, and are a good ways into mixing things.

I woke up to some of Tim Luntzel's playing almost every day without realizing it for the longest time. He played on a lot of Bright Eye's I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and my alarm is First Day of My Life.

I'm really particular about bass playing. I used to be a bass player, I'm not sure I like my own playing that well. I've come up with a few things that stand the test of time, but I think I'm too obvious. I don't really care for busy bass playing for the sake of being busy. In my opinion there's kind of a fine balance between contributing something additional to a song and overplaying, especially when people who aren't talented enough to breakout of some conventions try to be flashy.

Danielle and I were in the car listening to the I'm Not There soundtrack when I heard the greatest electric bass playing of my life, on Mira Billotte's version of As I Went Out One Morning. When we got where we were going I looked up the player in the liner notes, it was Tim. I tracked him down and got him to agree to record for us.

He recorded direct at a friend's house in NYC, we then sent the signal through a vintage Ampeg set-up at Metrosync, mic'ed with a Neumann U87 as well as something that I can't remember, but I don't think we used it in what we've mixed so far.

I hope Tim will play on everything I record for the rest of my life.

We also did drums on three songs two weeks ago. I had high hopes that an old friend would be able to play, but it didn't work out time wise. Paul Samuels helped us out, and it ended up being a great fit. Paul is primarily a jazz drummer, he teachers in Oberlin's jazz studies program.

For the most part we mic'd things in a very minimalist way. If you search youtube for 'recorderman' you'll find some videos of a guy demonstrating a two mic technique for drumset. Trying in part to capture the feel of old jazz records, we set up our overheads according to the directions (one over Paul's right shoulder, and one more traditionally above the hihat). We did add two other mics, one to each the kick the snare, giving us the option of adding reverb to the latter independent of the rest of the kit. For 'In Small Portions' we also set up a pair of room mics in opposite corners of the tracking room (which is quite large). I kind of wanted the sounds of the drums on Elliot Smith's Everthing Means Nothing to Me, although the style is a quite different, as Paul played with mallets. That song is the hold up to finishing the project, as it's going to require some intense mixing.

Document

This is for history. It may bore you, but there is a present at the end (but if you just read a bulletin from us, you already got it).

We spent April 13th at Chicago Sound Lab with Chris Bober. He's a brilliant guitarist, technical mastery and incredibly interesting compositional ideas. Tasteful too.

Chris and I were friends in high school, my dad drove us to see Morrissey in Detroit when I was 16. My brother lived with him a bit during college, and they played together in bands.

We ended up doing all the electric guitars for the EP in four hours. Chris went to school for jazz studies, studying guitar performance. With the exception of a second, more rhythmesque part under the solo on Love Poem everything was created on the spot, with every take quite different from those before it. I don't think we really took more than 4 or 5 passes on any part, and with the exception of one tiny punch-in, everything was recorded in one go, in large part because the parts were improvised and while they could be recreated, there wasn't really a point in figuring out what had been done.

All the parts save one were done with my G&L Legacy, which is a stratocaster in all respects but name, G&L was Leo Fender's last company - the L is for Leo. We ran it into only two amps, a Valvetrain 205TB for the cleans, and a Carr Hammerhead for the more gritty parts, and used only a single effect, a Lovepedal Morph (a fuzz pedal with both germanium and silicon transistors which can be blended), and that only with the Carr.

I had a few second thoughts about the Carr prior to the session. It's a pretty high gain amp, but voiced in what can seem like a sort of classic rock way, but in my listening leading up to the session I found a lot of its tones in late-era Beatles stuff, if it had been around, it could have been used on much of Let it Be.

CSL is a cool place. It's a pre-WWII building, the tracking room has an exposed brick wall, and they have a vintage SSL board that must have at least 48 channels - it's huge. We ended up recording the amps in the live room instead of an isolation booth, hoping to give the sense that the recording was being done in a slightly more natural way than the reality of hundreds of miles from, and six weeks after, all the acoustic guitar and vocal parts were finished. We're really pleased with the results.

Someday this might help someone writing a 33 and 1/3rd, if all goes well.

Here's your present:

I don't know much about John Peel. He had a radio show that bands played live on, and sometimes you could buy the recordings afterwards (I treasured my Cure Peel Session in high school).

Daytrotter.com is sort of a similar thing, only you can download the the music for free. They just posted 6 songs Death Cab did for them. There's a lot of great stuff in the achieves too.

A little piece of nonfiction (for Indiana and N.C. Democrats)

Our second home is the dog park, but this isn't really about dogs.

We love them (dogs), and we spend a couple evenings a week cooing over puppies, and trying to catch the action with our cellphone cameras that never take the picture quick enough.

Another thing about the dog park is that it brings together people who wouldn't otherwise ever meet. Lately, we've spent more time there talking to people our parents' and grandparents' age than our own. Some people show up in luxury SUVs, others in beaters missing hubcaps, but everyone has a common interest, and everyone talks.

I chatted with a guy wearing an Obama precinct captain pin a couple of weeks ago. Ohio is a swing state, but our home town is as blue as Vermont. Dennis Kuchinich is our Congressman, and he's loved here. This guy wasn't even a registered democrat until this year, and it turns out he put up six Obama volunteers for the week leading up to the Ohio primary, and he's now in Pennsylvania working to get out the vote. The guy's big issue is the war, and in particular, the $12,000,000,000.00 a month drain on the economy it is.

Health care is probably my number one issue, and truth be told, I've read great things about Hillary's plan. Among others, Elizabeth Edwards is a big supporter of Hillary's plan, though I don't believe she's endorsed either candidate. That said, we're supporting Barack.

We'd be happy to vote for Hillary in the general election, but not only do we think she'd have a tougher battle for the White House, but that if she was elected, it would likely be an administration of more gridlock and polarization. Our next president is going to have unprecedented challenges, and we need someone who has a chance of uniting and mending what is now a very fractured country.

Should you find yourself thinking about oinking like a pig

I think I read something once about how of all the senses, smells makes the most lasting impressions on people.

I believe most people fall into certain categories, myself included. I drive a VW wagon, am writing this on a Mac and so on...one of the things people like me do is entertain toddlers by oinking like a pig at every opportunity, and I did just that last week.

We’re headed to Chicago this weekend to finish up recording the guitars for our EP. Under the guise of going to my favorite guitar shop to buy a few last minute things, I snuck out from babysitting to the record store to surprise Danielle with a few new albums to listen to on the ride. On the way I tasted something for the first time since I was probably four or five years old. It was a little salty, and a little fiber-y, and immediately recognizable.

I’m a little disappointed in what I bought, but a couple weeks ago we struck gold with Thao’s new album. Check out Bag of Hammers.