...And the Flash Was Blinding
Hello, friends! Rob here.
Welp.
We're making a record.
Lately, I've started to catch myself using the word "record” as a generic term for a collection of songs by a single artist/band that are packaged and sold together in a particular order under the same title. This is new for me, and it's a little bit unsettling. My whole life, I've used "album.” To me, it just makes the most sense: A record is vinyl (the preferred medium of college students and their grandparents), an 8-track is that thing the one guy from your high school had to listen to in his stylish-but-unreliable old car, a tape is a cassette, a CD is the thing onto which a 15-year-old you burned that Five for Fighting song and then wrote a girl's name on in lime green Sharpie. An .mp3 is a necessary evil and barely deserving of mention. To me, saying "record” or "CD” or whatever feels like using the word "Coke” as a catch-all for any soft drink.
"Album,” on the other hand, isn't so brand-specific. It's more about the content than the medium. In the Classical era, the word referred to "a blank tablet on which the Pontifex Maximus registered the principal events of the year; a list of names." How perfect is that? An album is a collection of moments. It's a bunch of different pictures and scenes and moods and ideas all in one place. Thumbing through a photo album, you can look at one picture and say, "that was the road trip we took up the coast,” or "that was that Christmas when we all got those funny socks,” or oh man, "remember that Fourth of July when we all got food poisoning and missed the fireworks?” And those are all bits and pieces and memories, but even a spare handful of pinpointed little microseconds can have the magic of evoking Who We Were When. This thing we're working on in here, it's who we are right now. In ten years, it'll still be who we were when we were playing like this or writing like that or when our lives were changing in one way or another. Who we were when we were listening to Zeppelin or reading Fitzgerald. Who we were when we felt buoyantly in love or incurably alone. It's all of that, and we'll put it all together and place it into the world with the hope that somebody will open it up and feel something.
It's an album.
Sorry, you probably wanted to know how things are going. That was what I meant to tell you when I started writing, but I got lost pretty quickly. Anyway, the short answer is "good.” We spent all last week in pre-production, so, while there has been some workshopping, we're much more prepared than we were when we tracked City of Sound, and that plus [I don't even want to think about how many] years of being a band in the interim has made us a much more productive force in the studio. So, to be more specific, we're somewhere between the start and the finish, and I think we're all feeling pretty darned good today.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: If you don't know what a "photo album” is, or, God help you, if you think Apple coined the term, ask your parents. You'll probably learn something important.
And finally, in light of all this photo talk, here's a picture:
