Disconnected
Art Work
Notes – We started working on the album about two months before we lost our first drummer Dain. He’d chosen to teach English in South Korea and would be leaving in the summer of ’06. Jake was moving to Portland and I was soon to follow. So with the band’s future uncertain, we started recording to document the band. No one was certain that the band would exist in 5 more months… and it might not have if it hadn’t taken so long to record the album.
The recording was an arduous event. With no money or time to go into a studio, we recorded at my home in Eugene, OR. None of the album was recorded live, as the lack of equipment made the band lay down one instrument at a time. The resulting sound is very raw.
We recorded Dain’s drums first over a couple of days. I think there were two songs that were brand new to the band that Jake showed Dain on the last day (You, Gale). The rest we’d been playing at a couple gigs around town with maybe 5 other songs that didn’t make the final cut for one reason or another (Eyes Wide Open, Hot Line, Bozeman, Lakes of Fog, Glass Bottom Boat). Although they aren’t my favorite songs per se, it still surprises me that they are 2 of the tightest songs on the entire album. I think I played the solo for No Caroline about 50 times and there were at one time 3 more guitars on MySiS (My Son is Sane) and Violet. I apologize for the guitar on Drenched – the palm muting is unnecessary and it didn’t layer very well, but it was fun at the time. I apologize for my voice, I really didn’t know how I wanted to sound back then. I think I’ve found it since, at least I hope I have 
I do not apologize for putting Vicodin Dreams on the album. I still like the song, I enjoy the sound scape, the experimentation, the creepiness and general feeling of the song. People tell me it’s weird to have in the middle of the album, and that it breaks up the track list too much. If the album had come out on vinyl, this wouldn’t be as strange. To me the song was always meant to end the first half of the album.
–JP
Songs – One of the most challenging parts of recording this album was playing on Jake’s songs. Jake hadn’t been in the band very for very long at the time of recording, and his songs were mostly remnants of his former band The Nudniks. They were punchy and harder edged than my own, and all I wanted to do was layer guitars (mine natch) all over them. As I said before, I think there were upwards to 8 guitar parts on MySiS at one point that would never work well individually, but when layered sounded awesome. I didn’t really know what to do with most of his songs. I knew I was playing lead on most of them and that I could write my own parts…that might have been the first mistake.
Giving the freedom to write my own parts and to do the original mixing of the album (before we handed it over to Bert Stone), could have been the most dangerous thing to do for us.
<more later>