Diary of an album (Part 6) – Don’t be Alarmed

It’s been a while since our last recording update, so about time we updated you on the album, and other things going on in the DA camp…

We’d decided on 12 tracks for the album, and 11 of those tracks are now recorded instrumentally.  In no particular order they are:
The Chalice
Had I Known (what you know)
Tied to Shadows
Dark Ideas
Tama Connection
When the Karma Falls
Coked Up
Perfect Soldier
Alarm
No Easy Target
Old Street

The last track remaining to be recorded is Out of Spite, which is an acoustic number which we’re approaching recording in a slightly different way, hence why it has been left for a separate session.

Of the 11 tracks we have rough mixes of the completed recordings for The Chalice, Had I Known, Perfect Solider and Alarm.  The remainder are waiting for us to finish off vocals, or finishing touches such as the adding of keyboard parts, which we’re writing in the studio.

You may remember in the previous blog we mentioned a “failure of an old backup drive”, well those sessions couldn’t be recovered, so we ended up having to re-record what we had for Old Street, No Easy Target and Alarm.  It’s not all doom and gloom though, as I think we’re even happier with these versions.  Having to get things set-up again for scratch, we took the time to experiment a little more with the sound we wanted specific for each of these songs.  This is probably most apparent for the way we recorded the drums for Alarm, where we tried different mic placement and recorded the tunnel that we’d created for the bass drum.

We recorded the vocals and keyboard parts for Alarm this week, which Shane is going to spend some time mixing over the next week or so.  We’re going to finish off the year rehearsing through some of the new material that we’ve been busy working on this year.  If you made it down to the acoustic gigs that we’ve played recently, then you may have heard Worlds Collide already, well that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  We’ve got what we think are a strong set of new songs eagerly waiting to enter the fray.  We’re really pretty excited about them, and secretly (or maybe not so secretly now) we’re thinking that the follow-up album is some way to being written already.

The album is coming together, and we’re pretty happy with the way it’s sounding already, and we’re yet to get to the final mixes, and mastered versions.  It’s taken us a bit longer than we thought it may have, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and all that.  There have been a few things along the way that we hadn’t anticipated such as the hard drive problem, and nasty cold type things getting in the way of putting vocals down. Such things have dragged things out a bit, but the end is definitely in sight.

We should be back in the studio again early January to get more vocals down, and tracks mixed. Hope you’ve all had a great year, and look forward to seeing you at the album launch in the spring.

Cheers,
Stee J

re: Lost Days and Nights – choosing the album title

Since we last updated you we’ve worked our way through our short-list of titles for the album.  We’ve also met up with Alistair regarding the album artwork.  We wanted the artwork and title to work together, and also to reflect the vibe of the album.

We had an initial brainstorming session and came up with several title ideas.  None of the song titles seemed to work as an album title, and the lyrics we’d pulled out, and other ideas didn’t seem to quite suit the set of songs either.

A week or two later Marc had gone through the lyrics again and asked me what I thought of “Lost Days and Nights” as a title, which is taken from a line in the first verse of Old Street. He’d already mentioned it to Sonny who was apparently pretty keen on it, and my first impression was that I really liked it too.  I told Marc I was keen, but that I wanted to sit with the idea for a couple of weeks.

Shane had also suggested incorporating another idea in to the title, in a similar way to what we’d done on a Dear Acetate postcard in the early days of the band, playing on the band name ‘Dear Acetate’ as the opening salutation of a letter, and the title being an extension of that.  From that we derived the idea of using “re:” as a prefix to the title.  We thought that it worked when interpreted as being a prefix on the ’subject’ of an email or as the reference at the start of a letter.

Putting the two ideas together we had “re: Lost Days and Nights”.

We think it sums up the theme or themes of the songs on the album pretty well.

For the artwork Shane had the idea of showing the letter or email being written on a computer, or at least something to represent that, and from that came the idea of using a retro computer on the front cover.  Another idea I’d been keen on was using the image of the broken workings of a clock, suggesting that the time (days and nights) had been lost.  We’d also played around with the idea of somehow representing the logo in an interesting way.  We should be meeting up with Alistair again soon to go through the ideas we had, the ideas he’s subsequently worked with, and work out what artwork we’ll be using where.

Cheers,

Stee J