Getting the Band Together

Bob and I met with Chris at his band's rehearsal space in East Austin. When we pulled up, we realized that this was the same rehearsal space we were using back in the 80s with the Staff, and it was the exact spot where Bob and I had met 25 years earlier. Pretty cool coincidence, and it really set the vibe for the rehearsals and the recording sessions.

After the first rehearsal, we knew we really had a band. I'd wanted to do You Take My Breath Away, a love song I'd written for my wife, but we hadn't recorded a demo of it. So we made that the "band song." We worked out the arrangement together as a band, and that really helped us get into the groove as a single unit.

Recording the Basics

We recorded the basic tracks in March of 2009. It was just Bob, Chris, George, an intern whose name I forget, and me. Steve dropped by later, near the end of the session. We really just wanted to capture the drums and bass. If we got any guitar tracks recorded, we figured that would be a bonus.

We recorded the rhythm tracks for all of my orginal tunes, and then we recorded the John Hartford song Gentle on My Mind. We'd played the song s few times and we knew it pretty well, so we got a good recording in just a couple of takes. When we walked out of the cutting room into the control room, the intern said, "That was a great song! It was your best one yet." I told him thanks, I wish I'd written it. He was a little embarrassed, but it was all cool. We all had a good laugh about it.

Locking Down Some Rhythm

Once we got the basic tracks down, I booked a bunch of sessions so we could record the rest of the rhythm parts.

I wanted to flesh the songs out with Steve's cool twist on acoustsic rhythm guitar playing, some of the stuff I'd recently learned on my new nylon-string acoustic, some sweet slide guitar parts as accents, and some backing keyboards and harmonica. I also really wanted my friend Joe Blanda to play this nice slide part he'd come up with one day while we were jamming on my tune Hold On.

Steve came in next to do his parts. He was a one-take wonder. He had a good idea of what his parts should be coming in, and he was adept at learning new stuff on the fly. And George was getting a great sound out of Steve's Gibson Hummingbird. He usually ended up doing two parts on each song, using the capo for different fingering positions. We would end up panning those guitars just to the left and right of center in the mix, either side of the vocals and other lead parts. On some songs he  played George's Takaminie F-150 high-string acoustic to get an almost 12-string sound.

Keyboards Are the Keystone 

We needed to add some classic-sounding keyboard parts to really anchor the sound on a few of the tunes to my musical roots. I knew where I wanted them and how I wanted them to sound. Only thing was we didn't have a keyboard player. I'd put some approximations on the demo of what I thought someone could play on the CD recordings, but I'm no keyboard player. So we gathered together the keyboard equipment we had at our disposal. We had Bob's Yamaha MM6 Synthesizer, George's Korg CX-3 using a Leslie Rotating Tremolo Speaker System, and my Dell laptop and Axiom midi controller with several VSTi plugins that emulated B3s, Rhodes', and Wulitzers. Among the three of us we managed to pull together and record some pretty cool classic keyboard sounds, sometimes with two of us playing the keyboard at once.

I was playing a Rhodes-type piano part on Things'll Bet Better through my computer, but the MIDI keboard only had 25 keys and the part required another 25 keys. So, as we were cutting the piano track, whenever I would have to go up an octave, Bob would hit the octave button on the keyboard and my part would jump up where it needed to be. He'd hit the button again whenever I'd go back down to the lower octave.