Last weekend Ken, Troy and I met photographer Bill DiCecca at Pennypack Trust for some album artwork photos. For Ken and me, avid birders that we are, this location doubled as an opportunity to view some good spring specimens, since the trees are still just budding and the Trust property is a well-known birding haven. During each break in the action we grabbed our binoculars and tried to find the singing culprits just over the horizon or in faraway bare branches. The weather was perfect, clear, sunny, and actually almost a bit too warm by the time we finished up around noon, just in time to strip off some layers for the obligatory tick-check in the parking lot. But Bill created some sublime images, and they truly evoke a mood to match the music we’ve been cooking up in the studio.

Here’s a tiny taste:

Troy and I also spent a few hours in the studio with Matt Muir, at RetroCity in Germantown. Troy had been unsatisfied with his guitar tracks in Bitter Thing, so he had another go-round with his LSL Saticoy and Alessandro DRRI. He reports that, after an hour or so, he was very excited with the do-over, which involved mixing fuzz inducing germanium transistors with wacked delays.  He says he always wanted a rustic old squeaky merry-go-round sound to ebb and flow throughout the track, so the fuzz and delay were created to mimic that idea.  Eerie and haunting are a couple of words he uses to describe the sound, we’ll see how it plays with the master track…  Later, I got in the booth so we could put down the basic scratch vocal/rhythm guitar tracks for the last two songs we’re putting on this album: Rosebud and Blood & Wine.  B&W is a relatively new song we’ve never performed in public. But both songs have been sounding so good in rehearsal that we decided to add them to the project-formerly-known-as-6-song-EP, which has now morphed into an 8-song-full-length-whatever. The goal is to be finished recording and mixing this thing by end of June, with an eye towards late summer, early fall release.

Fingers crossed…