As we get closer to release date, I start wearing a lot of different hats. There’s the engineering/mixing/producing hat – finalizing the mixes for each song. There’s the business hat – making arrangements for pressing the CD, digital distribution, promotion etc etc. Then there’s the graphic designer hat – designing the cover art. Last time Gary and Chris designed the cover; this time I’m doing it myself, as I did with the first record. I’m no graphic artist but I know what I like 
Here’s a working copy of the front cover:
Mixing is coming along swimmingly. I’ve been experimenting with various song orders but today I think I stumbled onto a sequence that works really well. While listening to it in my car (as I do to check all my mixes) I let out an involuntary “fuck yeah!” at one point, which I think means things are really starting to come together
and so onto song # 8. sorry for the delay since our last post – rehearsing for the recent show kept us from working on the next song but don’t worry, we’re about to get you caught up real fast. t
this time a first – David Bos came to me with some guitar chords he’d written, which turned out to be the basis for our next song. here’s the demo he recorded in his home studio, with just him on guitars and tambourine:
song 8 (1st demo)
from there, I rearranged things a little and overdubbed some bass and drums and wrote a new bridge and vocal melody. the lyrics you’ll hear on the demo below were improvised stream-of-consciousness “placeholders” designed to hear how the melody sounded and nothing more. what can I say, the lyrics suck but it’s how I work 
song 8 (2nd demo)
finally, we have a rough mix which uses the 2nd demo as a foundation. there are new guitar overdubs by David (3-4 tracks) and a new bass overdub along with some acoustic guitar and mandolin by me. all that’s missing now are the lyrics. stay tuned . . .
song 8 (rough mix)
I’ve been laid low with a cold this week so not much progress to report on song # 4 – hopefully I’ll be able to post some updates this weekend. I’ve added a guitar and mellotron overdub but it’s still basically the same as the initial demo below.
I also wanted to clarify what I meant when I talked about the “indifference to climate change” theme I’m using to try and tie these songs together, lest anyone fear things were going to get a bit preachy. If you take a listen to songs like Get It Together, Draw the Line or You Don’t Care from the Sunny Days Ahead record, those songs all have an element of social comment without it being too overt. That’s the sort of thing I’m shooting for in terms of lyrical content – something with a message that’s still ambiguous enough that it can be interpreted in a variety of ways.
It’s fair to say that the last song, Fire and Ice, triggered some fundamental changes in this project.
Firstly, Gary and I came to the realization our musical ideas weren’t as compatible as they once were, so SSA has reverted to a solo project again, as it was for the first record.
Secondly, it occurred to me that my contributions so far had a recurring theme of elements – Touch the Sky, Fire and Ice – that I wanted to explore further as some sort of theme throughout the record. What came to mind was exploring the idea of people’s apparent indifference to climate change – that maybe by the time everyone’s satisfied it’s actually happening it’ll be too late to do anything about it.
Maybe human civilization has come and gone many times before and on some deeper level we know that if climate change wipes us out, human life will always re-emerge through evolution. Or maybe we’re all just narcissists . . . .
How do I take those ideas and make power-pop songs out of them?
Watch this space . . . . .
I thought I’d throw out some mp3 samples of how song#2 has progressed. The whole thing started as a strummy little bit that I (Gary) had. In fact, the way I was remembering the song was to call it “strummy.”
“Strummy”
I wrote some lyrics at this tempo and called it “My Pitiful Words.” But, James thought the song would work better as a more uptempo number and did a quick demo so I could hear what he meant.
“My Pitiful Words – faster”
I took that and did some new tracking. (see brief guitar video below). Here’s where the track stands prior to vocals and flourishes being added. James worked his production magic and quickly gave me this version back:
“My Pitiful Words – fleshed out”
We’re rewriting the lyrics, because until James brought it to my attention, I had no idea that “My Pitiful Words” was a phrase that had religious connotations. So, once we’re done, the song will change titles at that time (same thing happened with our first track, which was originally called Wanted to Fly and became Touch The Sky). We should be able to release the new track relatively soon, once vocals are tracked and final edits/flourishes are made.
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