It was December of 2002 and Lowfive had undergone a major transformation in the 3 months prior, having replaced the rhythm section with the addition of Ian and Jason on drums and bass respectively. Although we'd only written 2 new songs, the songs that survived the transition had changed a bit. On top of all that, consider that aside from the V2 demo, our only recorded material was from the very first 3-piece incarnation of the band. Needless to say, we were anxious to get some new recordings done!
We budgeted a few days of freedom at the practice house in Linneus following our Lowfive 1.2->2.0 transitional show, and for the few days around new years, we hunkered down in that freezing house with nothing but the passionate fire rock in our hearts and a small wood stove near our hind quarters. Knocking Ian's drums and Gabe's guitars down rather quickly, Jason came up to record bass the following day.
I think Sean was in Canada again for this recording, so Gabe did most of those parts as well. Sean did manage to make it back for the tail end of recording, so his stench did manage to saturate these recordings ever so slightly. He brought Tracy from Shadybrookdrive back to the USA with him, and we spent the following few days working on a SBD ep that never quite made it past the rough mix stage. Also recorded before we tore down the project studio was a song from Chuck's solo project, The Subpars.
Looking back, this was a really amazing few weeks, simply for the experience of just hanging out alone in an old house with all of our friends past and present stopping in to make music, play Atari, watch old tour videos, and complain about the intricacies of the old abandoned house. It saddens me to think (that in the summer of 2007, as i write this), that house has been sold, most of those friendships have withered or broken, and northern maine isn't much more than an infrequent holiday destination. At least we can always be sure that one thing will remain constant: the DPPS championship scores of Megamania and Kaboom!
For technical details, we used the same basic setup we used for the unfinished
Threnody sessions, albeit with a little bit more focus on getting things right rather than rushing through the material as fast as we could. given that we had a few whole weeks as opposed to a few days, and the fact that we were attempting about half as many total tracks, there was a lot less stress overall, and for as long as we were able to keep warm, we were able to enjoy ourselves.
After we all went our separate ways for the spring semester 2003, i was able to lay down some keyboard tracks and start mixing the tracks. i was fortunate enough to be taking a studio recording course that semester, and snagged the opportunity to re-record all of the drum tracks in multi-track using the studio classrooms at the school. this would be our first opportunity to progress beyond the flat, premixed "stereo line-in" drum tracks for which we'd had to settle up to this point. Ian came down for an afternoon to record, and after a slow start, we were able to knock out new drum tracks for the 6 songs intended for the release, as well as
Boys Will Be Boys. None of the cover songs got the multi-track treatment (none of them were that serious) and
Jesus Sunrise got cut out due to a combination of no time and the fact that it was being phased out of the setlists.
Despite our anticipation to get some new material finished and released somehow (to fill the gaps between the long out of print
V2 demo and our current lineup, once again our release fell victim to shifting circumstances within the band. Just as things were nearing the final stretch of really hunkering down and wrapping the project up, we got word that both Sean and Jason were planning on leaving the band at the start of the summer. While this was definitely going to put a brief pause on the band, it was basically cancelling all plans to nurture these recordings into a legitimate release, as a new lineup would be less likely to support an older release (as evidenced by the lack of focus on
Paths following the roster revamp after the summer of its release.
All in all, this release just progressed too slowly in a particularly volatile time for the band. Even if we hadn't replaced half of the band right before the intended release, at least 2/3
rds of the material was just updated and re-recorded versions of material that had already been released on
Paths and
V2. Things were growing pretty stale with the song catalog anyway, as the previous 8 months had generated 3 new songs (
Calico and
An Element of Subtlety for this release and
1913 having been written just after the recording sessions for this album).
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- On one of the nights at the old house after everybody had left, Gabe had me record some really loose ideas he was piecing together in his head. titled "test" at the time of the session, the song was presented to me nearly finished about 2 months later as
1939: Fuck You, Vinnie. i think the story around that one was that band sidekick Vinnie Migliore always wanted to write a song called 1939, and we were stealing it out from under his feet, or something of the ilk. The first demo mp3 i got of the song (recorded by Ian at Castle Newburgh) somehow was auto-tagged as
Ricardo Arjona's "Historia De Taxi". This was both funny and fortunate, as we liked the "historia" part, and eventually incorporated it into the final name of the song:
1913 (Historia).
- Avril Lavigne got real big in 2002, and we were basically really lucky that our song
Prelude sounded eerily similar to the song "Sk8er Boi". All of our close friends and distant enemies were kind enough to perpetually remind us of this, so we ironically embraced the connection. We even played a mashup of the songs in practice once or twice, and did a really cheesy "Sk8er Boi" intro to
Prelude at a live show to appease our pals Minor Setback. They loved it... or else! Anyway, gabe and ian were not amused at all at the suggestion of recording a cover... which is ironic, considering that all we recorded of the song is bass and guitar!
- This marks the 3rd and final time we recorded a cover of Ozma's
Natalie Portman. I think we got it right this time, despite the lo-fi recording. Also, this is one of the very few vocal tracks for which i provided backing vocals.
- DITBAE is technically a cover of the Impossibles song
Disintegration (is the Best Album Ever), although we always privately referred to our version as
Defender (is the Best Game Ever), coined most likely by Chuck during the initial recording sessions up at the abandoned practice house in Linneus... where we were playing a lot of Atari for a few weeks, including Defender, which provided us with the opening sample to this cover song. Also of note here: this song features gang vocals from Chuck and Sean!
- Because he was in Canada for most of the recording sessions, and because Gabe had already recorded a good chunk of his parts, Sean's tracks included a lot of novelty clips, including a 5 minute guitar solo over the entirety of
Boys Will Be Boys that actually sounds pretty cool! WAY TO GO, SEAN!
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