We’re headed to Blackbird Studio in Nashville in early January to record Minot, our first record since 2022.
It’s both a departure and a return.
Back in 2017, we recorded our album After the Parade at Blackbird. It's not a perfect record. But it's the record that best captured the live madness of the 2015-2018 Bell and early touring years.
We recorded it live across two days. It pretty stressful. But it's our best performing record. It's generated over a million streams across all services and made four Billboard Charts at our record release party at the Paradise Rock Club. I'm excited to get back to playing some of those songs this year.
This time we are headed down with Benny Grotto from Mad Oak Studio and he’s put together a crazy team of Nashville session musicians to record the songs that Kate and I have been writing.
We’ve narrowed down the initial song list to 20 songs, mostly new stuff, with a few older songs that we feel didn’t get their due. Right now, our team is essentially fantasy drafting the top 10 songs. Everyone on the team gets to pick oner song that has to go on the record. And each team member has the right to veto one song (provided that songs is not someone else’s top pick).
After that, it’ll be rank-ordered based on each team member picking two Top 5 lists. Each member of the team will make pick their favorite five new songs and also compile a list of five songs that they'd like to see re-recorded with this new approach.
After that, Kate and I are going to try to write one more burst of song writing, with the hopes of beating a songs on the list. Any song we write, that we like, we'll present to the rest of the team and they can vote on whether is replaces a song that is currently on the list.
In the next few weeks, I’ll take the initial song list over to Mad Oak and Benny and I will go over arrangement and structures. Once that’s done, we’ll record clean acoustic-and-vocal recordings for the session band. (I’m pretty excited about the band Benny built. The rhythm section has appeared on most of the Sheryl Crow stuff. One guitarist is the player on the radio version of Fast Car by Luke Combs and the other is the guitar player from my favorite Kacey Musgraves album and some Eric Church studio stuff.)
I’ll be posting updates (and maybe even some of the acoustic demos) as we move toward the actual recording session.
One of the cool things about the record is that this is going to be the first release from Tim’s Southie Live Music Club label. Down the road, we hope to make this process streamlined so that we could put out a sampler release (like the 90s) with different cuts from different songwriters who have appeared at SLMC.
The process is a weird mix of mundane and crazy. No one is asking us to make this record. So a lot of this is just us making stuff up as we go along. At the same time, we want it to work, so we take it very seriously.
We have a great acoustic demo of Kenmore Square. I’m not sure it needs a new version. Right now, i"m viewing it as an end-of-record acoustic song. But Tonight, on the other hand, feels like it needs a full band. But, really, we’re just guessing.
It’s also cool to be looking at songs like Aberdeen, Thanks for the Song, and Six String Remedy (maybe Books & Pictures?). Overall, I'm really looking to get back to some of the ethos that guided the early versions of the band, namely less produced. I want to be able to hear each instrument when they arrive in the song and I want the voice and melody forward.
I have a lot of trust in Benny. We’ve been lucky, across our career, to work, exclusively, with skilled musicians and engineers. But Benny and I have been working together for the last three or four years and I really like his transparent approach to production and arrangement.
When I get the votes back later this week, I’ll post the actual results. If we get stuck on a choice, we may put it up to a vote for people who are interested in chiming in.
Nothing groundbreaking here. But, this is one of my goals when it comes to focusing on building a dynamic website. This is the kind of update that doesn’t really fit in the context of social media, but this is the real stuff that goes on as we try to make a record and it’s cool to nerd out a bit about it here.