2010, that is…
Yeah, 2010…actually not a typo. For years we’ve posted a year-end wrap-up of what we’d been up to the previous twelve months (you can pour over a few of those here). They’ve tended to be drawn-out semi-comedic affairs that were long on “we bought a computer” sort of news and short of any announcement of real recording (not counting a band-ful of false starts, laughably optimistically documented here or here, both from four years ago now, for ex.).
So it’s sort of funny that the first year we didn’t tie up in similar style was the end of 2010. Funny because that July – July 16th, 2010 to be exact – we actually did finally, for real, no poop, start recording a next record (readable in more detail here and here) and even more shockingly, have actually kept working pretty steadily since then. Yep, that’s 2 1/2 years of straight work almost to the day as I type this, sitting in a parked car with a napping also-2-1/2-year-old outside the Prospect Park Zoo. That's a lot of time. Better be good, boyos.
Now, we didn’t do the year-summ at the time because in one sense, this is/has become/has always been a very part-time venture esp. now that we’re all officially married-with-heirs and most of us have careers and stuff.
At the same time, once under way, recording work does get done pretty much every day for whatever hours can be shoehorned in. And like any good life-ruining all-consuming hobby, it devours most available free time, thought, milk money etc. Friendships languish, exercise routines are abandoned, grand-children reach maturity and leave the house while we tinker away making H-O gauge albums in the basement dressed in period costume (note: it wasn’t period costume when we went down there). Personal & band correspondence & news tends to get continually shuffled back to the bottom of the to-do list. And band year-end reports get delayed for years on end.
But specifically, from that weekend in July, 2010 on through the rest of that year, we tended to either be assembling & tracking Kevin’s songs (i.e. tracking drums) at his house when Jerry came up or tweaking & overdubbing the bejesus outta those same Kev songs when Jerry wasn’t attending. And Charles began assembling demos of his own musical crap parade at his Brooklyn home-cum-electronic-wonder-lair. Two-and-a-half years on, we’re now calling those demos ‘album tracks’.
Next thing you know, it’s the end of the year and the next next thing you know, it’s two years after that. At the current rate, we’re maybe a few months out from ear trumpets and easing ourselves into the Muppet balcony.
Anyway, not like it matters whether we generate recording updates on a rigorous every-12-months schedule or not, but for the interested, like most bands and your cool uncle w/ a blog nowadays, we do tend to hit up the modern social media with smaller news & updates, and a lot more often. Feel free to join in the slough of despond and hilarity at our places of Facebook and Twitterly business.
We’ll post a quick 2011 wrap-up (which summarizes neatly as “12 more months of the same”) later this week and then where we’re at w/ 2012 under our belt after that…
Then again, I seem to have just made a deadline / prediction / plan using standard units of your human time, so take even that with a some salt.
Until then, thanks as always,
the wrens