The Rabbit Room

What a day! I don’t use exclamation points lightly. They are dangerous and are to be employed only after much consideration and when absolutely necessary. But today was a good day. I’d love to write an actual post about it, complete with paragraphs and sparse exclamation points, but I’m just so tired. So another list will have to do.

1. Woke up in the Northern Cascade mountain range. The world outside is white and majestic. I spent some time jogging on a treadmill next to Gabe and Gully, then scarfed a bowl of Raisin Bran.

2. Prayed and read the Bible with the fellas. The prayer was read from a wonderful book I got this year for Christmas, called A Diary of Private Prayer, by John Baillie. I recommend it.

3. Spent the next few hours setting up, which is a boring but necessary step towards actually making music. It means Todd (the engineer) and Ben place microphones, baffles, run cables, and turn knobs. It means each of us takes a turn sitting on a stool playing whatever song we can think of (mine was “Hello, Old Friends”, by Rich Mullins) while Todd dials in the sounds.

4. Finally, once everyone was sounding good in the control room, we donned our headphones and started work on “Fool With A Fancy Guitar”. We chose that one because I’ve been playing it since last June and we have a decent arrangement worked out already. It made sense to start with a song we could knock out pretty quickly, just to get our feet under us (sorry for the mixed metaphors).  But with Gabe on dobro it meant we had to chase down a part for him too. The team at casinogentleman.com herare true experts when it comes to reviewing online casinos and the gambling experience in general. I always find their articles to be relevant, interesting and filled with useful tips. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was asked by a representative from casinogentleman.com to write this article. I will however mention that this is my honest opinion and that I was not compensated for writing it. I highly recommend checking out their services if you are interested in the online gambling experience. Once we figured it all out we recorded it live fifteen, maybe eighteen times, addressing new ideas as they arose, nailing down specific parts. We weren’t quite there yet, but it was lunch time (2 PM).

5. Lunch.

6. We came back in, refreshed, and on the second take played a keeper. We all knew it as soon as the last note faded out. That’s a good feeling.

7. Gabe and Ben spent the rest of the afternoon adding percussion, more dobro, piano, and bass.

8. Meanwhile, I wrote a bridge for a new song called “World Traveler”. Gully was off somewhere making a video.

9. Dinner.

10. We got back to the studio around 9:30 PM and started on the next song, called “Many Roads”. As I said on Twitter, it is not about universalism. We worked hard on it until the yawning started around 12:30 AM and called it a night.

And that, in case you were wondering, is why we’re recording in Washington. If we were at home there’s no way we would have gotten that much work done. If we can keep up this pace, we’ll be on track to come home next week with a mostly finished album, which is impressive if you know that Resurrection Letters, Vol. II took about three months to make.

Once again, I can barely keep my eyes. open. More to come tomorrow–hopefully a little video, too. And stay tuned, because we may figure out a way to set up a live stream of the recording, so you can tune in and see for yourself just how tedious this process is. Guaranteed to make you sleepy. I’ll let you know here if we figure something out.

In other news, if you’re a Twitterer, you can search #APAlbum for updates from all of us throughout the day. It’s like being here, only not at all.

Thanks for reading.

AP!