btbam writing session: winter '08-'09

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2009-03-04T00:44:00.000-05:00

2009-03-04T00:17:00.012-05:00

Believe it or not, the picture above is from outside of Blake's house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina...in March. I've lived down here for four years and have never seen it snow and stick the way it has this week. But we've been indoors the whole time anyways, so it doesn't really matter to us what it does outside; other than the fact that we missed out on Moe's Monday because they closed at 6pm due to the weather. We finished two more songs this last week and have a good outlook for the rest of the album. So far the songs we have are titled "morbid corpse explosion", "classic sweater", and "rainy day pizza party". Here's some pictures from the last week:

yes, that is winamp3. living up to my "dark ages dan" nickname. and yes that is elf power.

and of course, our vegan treat of the week were the chocolate truffles...

We have some shows and a festival appearance coming up in April..we'll be sure and update before then with some news. Until then, I leave you with 28 year old Tommy Notes:

week 1

2008-12-13T16:07:00.021-05:00

As most of you know, we finished up our US run for Colors last weekened with four shows with some of our good North Carolina friends' bands. We then promptly got to work beginning the writing process for our next record at our practice space in Winston-Salem, NC. We had plenty of Moe's, LOST season 4, and Blake's mom's vegan chocolate chip cookies to fuel this first writing session.

Dan's work area:

Our best friend:

Space shuttle sounds and other great toys used in this song:

(note the pitch shifter is down an octave!)

Finishing up the demo:

...and four days into it we finished the first song for the new record. Some adjectives thrown around while writing it were "noisy Coalesce breakdown", "3/4 Mastodon groove", "9/8 Mars Volta", "Queen chromatic build up", "Megadeth chorus", and a whole lot more. Just your typical start to BTBAM album! I highly doubt we'll update this blog, I just wanted to post some evidence that we had started writing and were all really really excited and that there's an extreme abundance of great musical ideas flowing out of us. We're gonna spend the rest of Decemeber writing and relaxing before we head to Australia for the month of January. We'll pick back up with the writing in mid February after my other band ORBS records our debut full length and everyone's had a second to regroup after the tour overseas. Get stoked!

-dan/btbam