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Archive Sunday #73

Added 2024-11-03 17:00:13 +0000 UTC

In the middle of October, we had a few days to lay down some recordings at the now familiar Avast Studios. Most of the live band Madlo takes were recorded there, plus we had a bit of extra time to run some takes of songs off My Head Hz by Naked Days that Will was producing. We also randomly got invited by Fader magazine to attend the MLS cup happening in Seattle around then. I guess they had bought a bunch of tickets in advance, so they reached out to local bands to fill out the extra seats. So Will, Andrew, and I decided to check it out even though we hadn't been following any of the season. It turned out to be super fun and a really cool atmosphere. Plus Seattle actually won, so the crowd was going wild!

Towards the end of the year we were practicing a bunch to get the new material ready for the upcoming tour. We had started playing with Andrew's friend Max on keys, so he was coming up from Portland a bunch to hang out and work on the live arrangements with us. After about a month or so freezing our butts off in the practice space covid wiped out any future plans we had, so we went back to the drawing board. Once things settled a bit, we kept a close-knit pod and continued to work on finishing up Madlo at Andrew's place. I remember hanging out in his tiny bedroom while we were mixing the new songs and laughing a bunch when Andrew replaced Will's vocals with a scratch takes of his own when Will was in the restroom.

WT: In January, Andrew and I flew down to LA to do the album mastering with Bernie Grundman at his studios. He was super into making his espresso, and offered us some. We'd never attended professional mastering, so we didn't know what to expect, but it was a pretty quick process, and we were out of the door by the afternoon. Bernie was impressed by the direct and dry sound of the vocals on Can't Cool Me Down: "It's like radio!"

In February, we did our band photo shoot with Carlos Cruz and our old pals at Dos Rios, in Georgetown. This was to be the 'unveiling' of Trait, and I wanted a slightly futuristic vibe to the photos. We got great results from the large light-box, and came away with a lot of photos we enjoyed. We were also in the midst of preparing a video for Hollywood with Dos Rios. It would have been our most high-budget video to date, with a lot of spoofs of classic Hollywood films. We were just on the verge of booking locations to shoot it, when - but that'll come later in the month...