New Sherwood Album Update
Sherwood have posted a new MySpace blog with an update on the band's new album.Hey everyone,
I am trying to keep an account of what goes on in the studio day by day. I have pictures and I'll try to post them as soon possible. Hope you enjoy!
~Joe
Monday, March 16th, 2009
We spend most of the day setting up our gear in Brad Wood's home studio. We're living in the house next door to the Wood family which makes our commute extremely easy. This is, in fact, the most convenient recording/living setup we've ever had. After several hours of unpacking and organizing all our stuff in Brad's relatively small tracking room, we sit down to discuss our game plan. Sherwood spent the last 7 months going through 90+ song ideas, and we have a good idea of which ones will make the cut but we disagree on several songs. It's very refreshing to have the input of a veteran producer whose taste is anchored in decades of experience. Brad is a very friendly, talkative individual who occasionally wanders off on tangents but since we're working at his house (as opposed to a $1,000-per-day studio) we just hang out and talk quite a bit, snacking on pretzels and tangelos from the tree in his backyard.
At the end of the first day, everyone feels confident and excited to begin the pre-production phase. This part of the process differs from one producer to the next but generally involves sorting through all the songs and scrutinizing each one to make improvements. With Brad it will probably take a week or so. We spend the rest of the evening making dinner and recording a few song ideas in our living room (which has a sweet grand piano).
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
Since Brad has established his working hours as 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. everyone has enough time in the morning to make breakfast, go for a bike ride, call family/girlfriend, etc. I have brought a neat blue road bicycle down to L.A. that my dad used to ride in the 70's; I fixed it up a bit and have been riding it on a bike trail back home in Northern California for the last month or two. Biking in north L.A. is a bit different -- lots of waiting at traffic lights and avoiding large trucks that don't have a lot of room to get around you. Brad is also a bike enthusiast and he shows me on Google Maps a route he takes through Burbank into Griffith Park and back. It's a decently lengthy trip and I haven't had enough time to complete it but I'm looking forward to accomplishing that.
Anyway, we start working on songs with Brad. First up is a nice little tune we wrote very early in the demoing process called What Are You Waiting For?. Dan wrote the original idea in Europe in December 2007 and we had a pretty solid working version in July 2008. We even played the song on our October tour of the west coast, and in the UK in November so everyone is very comfortable with it (I think there are videos of us playing the song floating around YouTube if you want to check it out). We tweak the intro a bit and alter the chord progression for one of the choruses but generally leave the arrangement intact. One down, fifteen-ish to go.
We take an early evening meal break (dinner for some, lunch for others; after 5 years of living on the road none of us has a consistent eating schedule) and then get to work on another song that we last touched in July called Around You. This song is very different from anything we've done before -- an uptempo driving-style jam with very frantic, repetitive drums and guitar harmonics culminating in a fuzzed-out early 70's guitar solo. Less pop, more indie. Everyone loves the vibe and it feels good to run through it for a while. Like with the first song, little is changed from our original arrangement. We record a quick take to remember all the ideas and call it a day. Things are going very smoothly.
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
I wake up a little later than normal and don't have time to ride my bike all the way to Griffith Park and back so I plot a route around the surrounding blocks and ride around 5 or 6 times. The weather down here is gorgeous!
We seem to revisit songs roughly in the order that we wrote them so we get to work on another one from mid-2008 called Not Gonna Love. This song is an overwhelming favorite among friends and family and will definitely make the final cut. Also based on a repetitive drumbeat and chord progression, Not Gonna Love is fun, upbeat, and vintage Sherwood. Brad makes a few adjustments here and there, we come up with some better transitions, and we lay down a quick version before breaking for lunch/dinner.
In between songs it is discovered that Brad's father runs a funeral home in Illinois called Burpee-Wood Funeral Home which everyone finds hilarious, especially Mike who discovered the name on one of several sea foam green promotional pencils in the control room.
Next up is a pretty epic (by Sherwood standards) rock song called Ground Beneath My Feet. This one has changed a lot over the last 7 months, resulting in a sprawling four-and-a-half-minute guitar based monster that will probably see us experimenting with some diverse instruments including according, cello, marching drums, and maybe a gospel choir (I am not making this up). Everyone is pretty tired so we call it a day at 6:30.
We find out that our friend Monaca who tours with our friends The Matches lives only a few miles away so Dan, Nate, and I head over to her place where we hang out, eat some great chili and talk with her friends who include Dan Konopka (drummer for the band OK Go, and a really awesome fella), and a guy named Lucas with whom we share a lot of mutual friends because of our shared Warped Tour background. A very pleasant evening.
