The end of the recording process is in sight. At this point we’re mostly putting things together: choosing which passages to use from folks who came and recorded (usually several) instrumental tracks, deciding whether there needs to be percussion or bass and recording those. There are still a couple tracks that need (or needed, before Day 11) some broader conceptualization, though. One is The Best Art, a song I wrote after meeting an artist on the street with Pete and Maura Kennedy in their neighborhood in New York. Because Pete and Maura have been such mentors to me, and because this song wouldn’t have been written if they hadn’t introduced me to this person, I asked them to sing and play on this track. But they’re no longer a stone’s throw from Dave’s studio (or I would have asked them to play on more than one track!) so we had to come up with a way for them to record elsewhere. So we recorded a track that Dave sent to Pete electronically. By coincidence I was asked to give a talk in New York next week, and managed to find a time on that trip when Pete and Maura were available, so I’ll meet up with them at Pete’s studio for the recording. The other track on which we might do some remote recording is Take Me To Tallahassee. I love the way that song sounds at this point, even without adding anything else. But having Adam Sweeney play clawhammer banjo on it when he backed me at the show in Portland made me realize that the banjo is perfect for that song (and since I don’t have banjo anywhere else on the CD that’ll also add a nice point of interest). If only we’d figured this out before Adam was in Western MA for a visit. But, alas, no. So we’ve shipped him a track and are hoping he can find a way to record a banjo part to it. If it works, great. But if it doesn’t, it won’t be a disaster – the song sounds fantastic as it is. The other track that we hadn’t done anything at all with was The Friends That I Need. This is a song I’ve never performed live, and only a few people have heard it (including my occasional songwriting group, which wasn’t especially taken with it). But I like it, even if it has so many words that I can’t imagine actually being able to perform it. It’s a song I wrote after a day I was in an extremely bad mood, brought on by some particularly awful people I had to interact with on a semi-regular basis. That evening I went to see Nerissa and Katryna Nields play at Passim, and everything felt better; I was inspired by that experience to write the song about the kinds of people I want to be with and the kinds I’m learning to avoid. So for sentimental reasons (and also because she’s an amazing singer) I asked Katryna to sing harmony on that song. This was the day she was scheduled to do it, although we had to shift times around a bit for kid-related obligations, and then try to fit it into a pretty narrow slice of time. Which ended up working. She’d warned me that we’d probably need to work together on figuring out some of the harmony, because the song is – as mine, deceptively, turn out to be – pretty complex musically. But she came up with a fantastic part (that we worked through a bit to make sure it fit), and the recording is great. And then Dave and I added bass, tambourine, claves, and worked out – it took awhile – an interesting 12-string guitar part. The rest of the day was bass and percussion. The percussion considerations have been especially fun – we listen to a track, and wander around trying to find the right sorts of instruments to make the kinds of noises we’re envisioning. And then follow the discussions of what rhythm is right, where it should come in and where it should be played . . . . It’s a complicated set of decisions! But a lot of fun, actually. (Of course, sometimes we give up. We tried three different recordings – brushes on paper, tomato shaker, cymbal hit with brushes – for a rhythm track for Ex-Voto (and that doesn’t even count the number of options we tried and rejected even before recording them) and ultimately decided that nothing sounded right and that it would be better without percussion at all.) At the end of it all we made sure I had rough mixes of where we are on all of the songs. In some cases there are decision still to be made – I have two different versions of Jim Henry’s mandolin parts for Resolution, and need to figure out which bits to use where; also we’re still going to record bass for that song. The goal now is to listen to everything and figure out what needs to be changed or added, as we get to the home stretch.