Day Seven!

What, you may ask, happened to days five and six? No one really knows, to be honest. There may have been some sort of temporal anomaly or a wrinkle in time or sunspots or a band-wide case of amnesia. But it's more likely that no one bothered to do anything with the camera and thus the blog was bare. But have no fear, this weekend we have a few little tidbits for the fives of sevens of you reading this! Today we began the grueling task of recording vocals. This often involves several moments known as Every Muscian's Worst Nightmare. Such a nightmare occurs when one has to hear one's vocals played back in the control room a capella without any backing tracks! It's truly heinous, gentle readers, and a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy.

But! More important than the recording of vocals is the discovery of what just might be the most perfect album art image we have ever stumbled across:



How flawless is that? Alas, we know not the name of this true artist and wordsmith so nary can we use it for our album cover lest we steal his or her thunder without credit. Okay, we kid, we kid, this is not going to be our album art. But maybe the back cover photo? Or just tucked into the liner notes? It's kind of too perfect not to use in some capacity. In searching around the compound where Castle Ultimate is housed I stumbled upon some other graffiti:



Pithy, no? But the question begs: is this graffiti emo or simply bar rock? The first line implies a somewhat emo sensibility. But the g-less "livin'" calls to mind a kind of Joe Cocker-esque bar rock vibe. It's really hard to say so let's create a new genre of "bar emo" and see if we can spread that around. Can you even imagine the lyrical and sonic horrors that could spring from this newly formed genre? The mind reels!

So today was all about Colin and his vocalizing. And all about Peter hiding in his car and feverishly trying to complete lyrics for the many songs he needs to record vocals for tomorrow. Colin crooned and wailed and belted and seranaded his way through more than half a dozen songs. At the very end he had to butch it up for his vocals on the song "Payback", an old song brought back to life that is full of scandalous lyrics of a rather prurient nature. Here's a little clip of him recording said vocals that was recorded unbeknownst to him through a dirty, dirty window:



So manly! So rawk! And yes, you can hear Aaron at the end about to tell him to do part of it over due to voice crackage. But seriously, he really howled it out for this song and I think it's going to be one of the best tracks on the album. I was really proud of Colin today because he jumped outside of a lot of his past lyrical boundaries and came up with some great stuff. But I don't wanna get all gushy and mushy here. We're heading back in tomorrow to tackle Peter's songs and maybe do my little doo-wop-shoo-wop-bop backing vocals as well. Expect more surreptitious video to come!

Sleep tight,
Chriso