It’s somehow appropriate: 13 tracks on the CD, 13 days in the studio recording. (The days have been of varying lengths: today was only 3 and a half hours. But I guess the tracks are of varying lengths too.) Of course it’s not as simple as one song per day. Today was the final day to do small fixes and additions before mixing happens sometime next month. We did a lot in a short time. Spent the most time on Cross that River. We started off by re-recording my first and last lines of each chorus. In that song Jenny Goodspeed echoes what I do in the chorus after each line (more or less). And it’s the one song where Jenny’s voice didn’t match mine particularly well – because of how we each sang the words. I carefully enunciated “ you’ve got to cross that river” while she sang “ya gotta cross that river.” And it made sense to change mine to match hers a) because I’m still in the studio and she’s not, and b) because the feel of the song as it has turned out – it has sort of a Caribbean feel – actually matches her phrasing better. So we changed mine. We then dealt with the triangle “dings.” On the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th verses we’d previously added a ding after each line, and it almost made it sound like we were making fun of the song. Too many dings! So we hatched a plot in which, the first time it happens, it comes after the 1st line, the 2nd time it comes after the 2nd line, and the last time it comes after the 4th line. So it’s an interesting embellishment, rather than a regular rhythm. Plus it makes one more cameo at the very end. I think it works. And then Dave sang! Dave doesn’t sing, much (Katryna commented from stage once that in all the full band days of the Nields they hadn’t been able to get him to sing on stage once). But he sings well! And so he did, one vocal line in the second to last chorus (on the echoes) and two vocal lines. He pointed out that this now means that the only time he’s sung recorded harmony in the past 15 years will have been on CDs by people named Beth (the other one being Beth Amsel). It’s good to have a niche. We’d also been musing about whether to add some kind of lead instrument for the 4-measure space (on one chord the whole time) between chorus and verse. I’d pretty much decided we didn’t need anything (it has a nice rhythmic feel) when Dave appeared with a papoose (a guitar-like instrument kind of like what a guitar would sound like if you cut it off at the 5th fret) and played some stuff on it; it sounded too cool not to use in the second half of the song. And then we declared it done. We then turned to Many Paths and removed half the percussive slaps that were serving as (too long an) intro. And I re-recorded the first lines of a couple stanzas. I write songs that are hard to sing, and the first lines in particular are, so a few of them didn’t sound as good as I’d like. But I also realized that some of it is not about the lines themselves; it’s about the psychology of it. Because I could sing the line fine, and then we’d start the recording by listening to the intro and when it came time for me to sing I couldn’t sing it even the way I’d just sung it before. I seem to have psyched myself out during the wait, feeling the need for a big entrance. We ended up cutting off the intro so I had almost no warning, and then I could do it. Go figure. Finally, we turned to the first rhythm guitar on If I’d Known. I’d recorded it initially, knowing that I’m not especially used to playing short rhythmic (muted) strums, which is what a lot of that song uses. But I was pretty pleased with how it turned out nonetheless. We’d already had Dave do a second guitar capoed at 5. And I really liked the way it all sounded – I’m loving that track. But one of my most concerned listeners really didn’t like it, and was convinced that it’s sufficiently not my style that I wouldn’t be able to do it well enough myself. So Dave (who also liked it as is) agreed to record a version of it (playing my guitar). It’s a perfectly lovely version, but I don’t see a particular improvement over the original. (And now that the critic in question has heard both, it looks like there’s general agreement that we’ll go back to the original.) So that was it. We ran a few rough mixes of things, but – other than awaiting a banjo track to be recorded in Portland next week for Tallahassee – we’re done recording. Stay tuned for mixing!