Well it’s been a week since I’ve done any singing and my voice feels really good. Tomorrow night we’ll start the overdubbing process at the warehouse. If I can keep my wits about me I should be able to get the lead vocals done in a few takes. Of course that’s what I said 750,000 takes ago when I started. I really think that having the guys around will help. God I hope so. Having my voice back to 100% will also be a nice bonus.

The plan for tomorrow night is to track everything that’s left on Dog and Pony Show. That would be the lead vocal, Nate’s vocal, Mike’s vocal, and I want Nate to try a couple of keyboard ideas I have. If all goes according to plan (and it never does) that song should be done.

Last week Mike really emphasized the point of us trying to finish one song at a time. We definitely need that sense of accomplishment since I (over the last two months) have completely halted all forward progress. That way the task won’t seem so overwhelming. Then Hughes can start doing some real mixes while we continue to do overdubs. Then we’ll really start to get an idea of how this thing is going to sound.

Today is my wife’s 29th birthday. This is the real 29th birthday and not the one she’ll say she’s having for years to come. Tonight I took her and Riley to her favorite Tex Mex restaurant, Chevy’s. Great idea. Nothing says “I Love You” quite like an evening of crippling diarrhea. She gets the two dollar margarita and I get the two hours on the can. Nice! Happy Birthday sweetie.

Here’s a quote from John Dear’s comment on my last entry.

“I know you dig Wilco, Radiohead, Jellyfish, etc. but (hate to break it to ya) to me you don’t really sound like any of them. I’m hoping in a future blog you could give me a way to describe your sound to my friends by using a maximum of 3 well-known bands.”

I don’t really think we sound like those bands either. I talk about Wilco a lot because I love the way their records sound. A Ghost is Born is particularly attractive to me for that reason. Summerteeth is really my favorite though. On that record there are different elements mixed together that I think are some of the same elements we mix together. It’s the late 60’s pop thing mixed with the traditional country thing. Our version of 60’s pop would be a song like Outta Sight Shake. Our version of traditional country would be You Devil You or Songbirds. I know those are both a bit of a stretch for traditional country but to my ears that’s what they are. We don’t sound like Wilco but I think that people who like Summerteeth would like us.

Radiohead? Hmmm…yeah we sound nothing like them at all. Maybe a smidge like The Bends but nothing from OK Computer to now.

Jellyfish? Maybe if we had sung our harmonies a bit more in tune. Jellyfish is by far the most influential band to my writing. That’s no surprise to anyone who reads this blog. Jellyfish’s influence doesn’t just color my writing, I blatantly steal from them. If you break down what Jellyfish does into its parts it would go like this: loud-aggressive-Vox AC30-sounding guitars with vintage-Beatles/Zombies influenced keyboards, three part harmonies, bouncy beats with too many shuffles, strong melodies, and well thought out lyrics. That’s us too but we don’t really sound as much like them as it would seem. They don’t really have any blues or country in their stuff at all. We do. I think Dog and Pony Show and Lunar Beams are very Jellyfish-ish. So is Admiration Day Parade if they’d had a bad writing day.

I don’t know how to put a tag on what we do. I’ve been trying to come up with something for years but it’s hard to do when it’s your own music. I’ve been told that my voice sounds like Kenny Loggins’ voice from the Loggins and Messina era. I play guitar like Ian Moore would have had he been drunk and in The Kinks for the Village Green Preservation Society record. Dino plays like John Bonham would have played if he’d been born black and played in The Beatles. Nate plays keyboards like Billy Preston would have if he’d grown up listening to nothing but jam bands. Mike plays bass like Billy Sheehan whould have if Jason Falkner had been the guitar player with David Lee Roth’s band instead of Vai. Does that clear it up?

Post your comments. You tell us what we sound like to you.

Last night we got together to watch the video of The Pageant performance. I probably shouldn’t go into it. We got a really great response to the show so that’s the most important thing right? Right! So when I got home Angel asked “How was practice”? I told her we watched the video and gave her our general response. She then read me the riot act. “You guys are all fucking stupid! Why do you want to go and ruin what everyone thought was a great show?!” She was sincerely pissed. I was actually relieved that she acted like that. I expected more of a “It was fine honey. Yeah…I mean…yeah…well…I heard a few problems but whatever…it was fine…no one noticed”. I would have slit my wrists if she had said something like that. Anyhoo…’nuff said. Glad y’all liked it. Suckers.

So since I’m being honest and slightly candid here’s the latest on the recording. I think that almost all of my lead vocal tracks are going to be scrapped. Last night we listened to the stuff I’d been working on. That was the first time the guys had heard some of them. The performances that they liked, I didn’t…and the ones that I liked, they didn’t. That’s not good. So it’s back to the drawing board.

Here’s my amateur psychoanalysis of why I have completely failed to deliver any album-worthy performances despite incessant recording for the last two months. When I started recording the vocals I hadn’t done much singing in the two months prior. The first couple of songs I recorded were OK. Not great. Now that I listen back to them I can tell that my voice was a little weak. After I got through two or three songs I got sick. It is unfortunate that I did so because I am not smart enough to wait until my voice is healthy to resume recording. Instead, I plowed on through. My voice sounded like pure ass. I lied (to myself) in my blog and said that I actually liked the haggard tone. I continued to record and couldn’t understand why my voice wasn’t getting any better even though I didn’t feel sick. So this goes on for weeks. I finally gave up a few days ago when I woke up one morning (after recording for hours the day before) and could barely speak. OK. I get it. I’ll stop. Get off me.

Here’s the new plan. I’m going to wait until my voice is back to 100% before I begin again. I’ll now be recording my vocals at the warehouse with the band in attendance. Our recording sessions will only happen once or twice a week so that will keep me from doing any more damage to my pipes. It will also keep me from doing any more damage to my self confidence. When I record alone and am left to my own devices I become such a perfectionist that I get nothing done. I hate that about myself.

When we recorded You Devil You out at the church with Hughes he said “OK, get in there. We’re going to do three or four takes start to finish. Then we’re going to pick the best one and that’ll be that”. I think we ended up using the first take. That’s the approach we’ll take from here on out. I’m such a turd.

Jeff Lehman (formerly known as John Dear, formerly known as Jeff Lehman) sent me a whole slew of pictures he took at The Pageant. A huge-sloppy-wet-thanks goes to him for those. Here’s the page with those if’n ya wanna check ‘em out. Good stuff.

I’m anxious to see the video from the show to see if my little freak out session was noticeable to the naked eye. During one of the songs I ran out of breath at the end of a phrase and took a huge breath with my mouth still placed firmly on the mic. This is never a good idea when the mic isn’t yours. There are untold millions of gallons of mouth stuffs that have been sung, coughed, and barfed into those mics. God only knows what I sucked out of there but it tasted exactly like fresh blood. As soon as the song was over I started searching my shirt, tie, and guitar for any signs of blood because I was convinced that I had busted my gums or lip on the mic. I didn’t see anything so I ran back to the drum riser and started rubbing my fingers inside my mouth to see if I was bleeding. Since we were in between songs, the lights had gone low so I couldn’t really see much. I hoped for the best and went back to the mic.

I never did find any blood thank God. I guess that just means that it was someone else’s blood I was tasting. Nice.

It reminded me of a Drew Johnson Band gig from a few years ago where I scraped the skin off of my index finger using it as a pick. I didn’t realize I was bleeding until my strings had gone completely dead and the people down front were pointing in disgust. My guitar was totally covered in blood. It was like a G. G. Allin show without the poop and pee.

Thanks to everyone who came out to The Pageant last night. That was the most fun I’ve had playing in a long, long time. Sorry about not doing an encore. We just simply ran out of time. Thanks for asking though.

I’ll try to have some video of the show posted within the next week. Dino recorded the video and audio so we should have something pretty decent to show you. I set up my camera too but I forgot to start it before we played. Doh!

I’ve got a few pictures that Angel took but we should have more soon that were shot by an amazing photographer named Frank DiPiazza.

Here’s a quote from bleemus’ comment on yesterday’s post concerning the show last night.

” Then there is the guy dressed up at the fuckin’ phantom of the opera or someshit… does he know halloween isn’t until October??”

Did he look anything like this guy?

I don’t know who he is either but he’s all hugged up with Kristopher Curtis’ woman.

Here’s me and Dino with the incomparable Donny Besancenez…aka Donny Bissonchnescchinoszescz.

Here are a couple of pictures that are totally unrelated to the band. I just think they’re kinda cool. They were on there with the pictures from last night so I came across them when I was dumping the camera.

This was the view from my backyard on the morning of Angel’s surgery.

This is the cool flower arrangement my mom bought for Angel after she came home from the hospital. This picture looks 3-D for some reason. That’s why I think it’s cool.

I got home from sound check about an hour ago. Took a shower, played some video games, and smoked about three packs of cigarettes because I’m so nervous. It’s about time to head back. Wish us luck. After-party at Nate’s.

Next week we’re going to be moving the recording back into the warehouse to do the overdubs. We intended to do them here at my place but now that we’ve got a dog there is never any silence so recording is out of the question. I’ll be glad to have us all together again during the recording process. The vocal overdubs did not go terribly well for me so I’m anxious to just have fun again.

Last night before practice Dino and I were talking about the album and I told him that this group of songs doesn’t feel complete to me. I don’t know exactly why but I think there may be some songs that need to be on the album that aren’t and some that are on the album that shouldn’t be. There are a couple of songs in particular that I don’t think are my best work. Dino and I both agreed that we’re not OK with having anything on the album that isn’t our best.

Two of the tunes we decided to leave off are Lunar Beams and Beautiful Text. Now we’re starting to think that maybe they should be included. The reasons for leaving them off were very different for each of those tunes. Lunar Beams was left off because we thought we got it right the first time we recorded it. But we can’t exactly put it on the record the way it is because of two things. First of all, the quality that recording is nowhere near what we’re able to do now and we think it might stick out like a sore thumb. The other thing is that we had a different bass player and a different keyboard player at the time. It just doesn’t seem right to put it on the record like that.

Beautiful Text was left off because Dino and I feel like we never really learned how to play that song right. We don’t even know what right is actually. But whatever it is, our initial recording wasn’t it. People really like that song though. Hell, I like it too. It’s pretty catchy. We’re considering tackling that song again to see what we come up with. I’ve also got a couple of brand new tunes in the works that I’d like to have considered.

When we first started recording it was looking like we were going to fly right through this shit and bang out an album very quickly. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Since we moved the recording out of the warehouse we’ve all had some time to take a breath, clear our heads, rest our ears, and get some perspective on what has been tracked so far. We were on an extremely tight schedule so we flew through the stuff and got done what we needed to get done in the time we had. That’s all well and good and I’m pretty impressed with what we accomplished but now we need to realistically look at what’s right for the album and what’s not. We need to forget about releasing a record in the next couple of months. That’s not going to happen. We could do it and it would be a pretty good album but it wouldn’t be great. And when you only put out an album every four years you want it to be great, not just good.

So here’s what we’ll probably do. We’ll finish all the overdubs on what we’ve got so far. Then we’ll go back into the studio and track another batch of songs that will most likely include Lunar Beams and Beautiful Text. Then after the whole mess is mixed and done we’ll make the decision on which songs go on the record and which songs just go on the website.

I just got another one of those emails that really make my day. I always put these in my blog without permission so I won’t say who it was from here’s a little bit of it.

“Something changed for me at the last Formula Kid show. A spark was lit. Usually seeing Drew frustrates the hell out of me as I realize I will never be the singer/songwriter/musician that he is, but this time I was inspired.” —-”I also got warm fuzzies from the amazing people at the after-party and especially want to thank Kris for his persistent praises. When I got home that night I immediately dusted off the ProTools and went to work. I didn’t get to sleep until 2pm Sunday afternoon. I’ve been riding a creative wave for the past two-and-a-half weeks, not just with music, but also photography, writing, and art. I just wanted to acknowledge both of your contributions to my life and say thank you.”

God dang you people are the best. I just got home from band practice and there couldn’t be a better time to get this email. I’m tired as hell, my ears are ringing, my head is pounding, I’m hungry, and this email is just another reminder of why we do this: the blow jobs and the coke. Thank you so much to the author.

I haven’t said much about the recording lately so here’s an update. All of the lead vocals and guitars are done. It all took a lot longer than I expected since I was sick about half the time. And then there’s the fact that I just suck. Some of these songs were far harder than I expected. To Mother from Her Son and Twenty Miles from Waterloo were both particularly tough.

The next thing we’ll be doing is background vocals. I imagine we’ll start on those next week since we’ve got band practice and the gig this week. After that there are some keyboard overdubs that need to be done. I believe Dino has been working on recording the percussion stuff on his own. He’s got his own Pro Tools rig at his house. After that, we dump all of this crap on Hughes and see what he thinks. When he gets some decent rough mixes going with all the vocals and overdubs then we’ll have a clearer idea of how the songs are shaping up and where we need to sprinkle the fairy dust and where we need to wipe the fairy dust off.