These are the “basic tracks” of the album, in other words these recordings are the 5 of us playing live, with no overdubs or studio trickery of any kind. Of course, the final album will have plenty of overdubs (mostly guitars and vocals), and will sound a bit different, but we feel these relatively stripped-down files do a good job of capturing the energy of the 5 of us playing music.

The song excerpts are from Seems Like, Tip Of My Tongue, Too Bad For You, Breathe, Cackle, Sway, Long Way To Go, Make It Through, and Unglued.

Enjoy!

I’d like to get a song-in-progress or excerpts up here soon, to whet the Freakwitch appetite….

We had a GREAT weekend at Jon Wyman’s studio. In this shot, I was standing in the live room, and took this shot, you can see the back of Jon’s head, and Todd, Alfred, Matthew, and Yo as we listen back to some of the takes. And if you really look, you can see my reflection as I took this picture, right in front of the diffusors on Jon’s back wall.

After a weekend of chill, vibey, and productive work, all the basic tracks (meaning drums and bass) are finished for the new album. They sound great, these are easily the best basic tracks I’ve ever had to work with for Freakwitch. This is due to several factors…. Alfred’s drumming, Jon’s engineering chops, a great kit, a great room…. and most importantly, a well-rehearsed band of skillful people doing their thing…. there were very few edits required, only a handful, which were usually just splicing together different takes. This is refreshing in this age of grid-editing, drumagog, beat detecting, and drum samples; great drum tracks that don’t involve me programming fake drums! What a concept.

Next step…. JWL’s guitars. Stay tuned.

We’ll get mp3s up here soon, but first we want to finish artwork etc for the album.

It’s called Interconnected, by the way….

Rain Song, Reach Your Heart, Penelope, Edge, Edge (reprise), Hope, Tip Of My Tongue, My Own Way. Not sure of the running order.

Also, we need an album title and artwork. Anyone have any ideas about that?

Watch this space. Looks like we’ll (finally!) have some new music up here this time next week!

Not much else of an update, we aren’t gigging right now, but as you know we have a few lined up. We also are on board for this year’s Maine Pagan Pride Day, which is always fun. Last year there were dancers, and I believe that will be the case this year again as well.

This is the challenge: record an album in 29 days, just because you can.
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.

It’s a little like National Novel Writing Month, (NaNoWriMo.org) where writers challenge each other to write 1,700 words a day for 30 days, or the great folks over at February Album Writing Month (fawm.org), who encourage artists to write 14 new songs in February. Maybe they don’t have “Grapes of Wrath” or “Abbey Road” at the end of the month, or maybe they do—but that’s not the point. The point is they get busy and stop waiting around for the muse to appear. Get the gears moving. Do something.

We’re going to give this a go. You can visit our user page to get more info or follow up on our progress.

• Freedom Fest June 20-22
• Hempstock August 14-17
• Harvest Fest October 3-5

The fests are undergoing some changes, apparently they will no longer be held at Harry Brown’s farm in Starks. They are working on the locations, but we’ll let you know more as things clarify.

In the meantime, recording continues. I have been continually upgrading the recording setup, and indeed I’ve started Crafted Recordings as a commercial recording/consulting business. Plus I’ve taken a job in the acoustics industry. So there are a lot of changes happening around Freakwitch that can distract us a bit, but in the end these changes will support what Freakwitch is doing.

We are also thinking about taking the RPM Challenge and record an entire album, start-to-finish, in February. The idea was inspired by the National Novel Writing Month, in that it imposes a completely arbitrary deadline as a way to spur creative production. It’d be a good exercise for us if nothing else. We’ll make the decision one way or the other on this and keep you posted. Watch this space.