28February07: The flight home from Brisbane, Australia marked the end of an amazing trip and the beginning of this album
I arrived home to San Diego in early March and was hungry for some time in my home-studio. I couldn't wait to work with the song ideas I had sketched during the trip around the world. In the beginning, I needed a few items to get the studio up to par. I took care of all the ordering from a friend's basement in Brisbane, Australia and the boxes were waiting on my porch for me when I got home. Alongside the equipment I had ordered, in the boxes were candies, like smarties and taffy and stuff like that. I was so mental to be home and recording that I ate only these seven or eight candies and drank water for three days straight. I was in the studio for 20 hours a day. It was such a release to finally record, and bring to life, some of the music I had spent so long writing and thinking about.
In the studio
After those first few days I managed to find a Trader Joes and got some food for the house. I remember thinking that the time required to respond to even a single email was too much time out of my work day. I did nothing but recording, all day, every day. I would listen to song ideas I had recorded on my MP3 player and try to put words to a broken melody or put a better melody to good words. I had written more than thirty melodies singing and playing into the MP3 player and had written lyrics in a notebook for dozens more. The first few months were spent pairing the two and searching for the diamonds in the rubble. It's funny how some things would sound amazing at 2AM and need so much work at 8AM after a night's sleep. Write and re-write was the rule, looking through pictures, reading my travel journal and poring over video the whole while.
Gradually, songs surfaced and ideas were finished. Along the way I learned so much about the song-writing process. Lyrics have never had the importance to me that they did when writing this record. I think that's one of the biggest and best differences in my material from earlier recordings. I have tried harder to open up and make personal expressions and I believe the songs have benefited.
Playing a quiet, acoustic in N. California
I began playing live shows for friends at small parties or open mics or small venues around San Diego. This gave me a chance to see which songs would go over well in front of people and which needed some work. It's a really telling process; the reactions of people were all I needed to push a song a certain way. I was surprised that some songs like STAY were so popular with people. The song list grew and shrank as I added an removed songs. Eventually I had settled on twelve or thirteen songs. In December of '07, I headed into the studio with a drummer and bass player in tow.
After the studio session in LA, I came home and began to layer the guitars, vocals and keyboards. The songs started to gain identities; some good and some not so good. Through a friend, I contacted a great guitar player in LA and brought my entire recording rig up to his house. Slowly, over the course of the next 90 days, I realized that the drums would have to be completely re-recorded, so I went back up to LA and into another studio. Now the drums were just as I wanted them, the bass had been recorded and the guitars were happy (please see the musicians link above for more info on the amazing players who helped out so much). There was a new reality, I was on my own to finish this thing.
Time passed and I had even more musicians come in to sing and play. By July, the CD was nearly finished. I added strings to a song and re-sang a few of them in the last week. In the first week of August, 2008, the CD went off to mastering. 11 songs, down from 12 and just over 46 minutes were all that were left to represent the work of the last 18 months of writing/recording and a half-year of traveling the world.
I hope you find enjoyment in the songs!
Best,
-Zank
16 AUG 08
