Bottle Boy

In looking back at the last few weeks, I can see my entries here have been consistently substance free. That is not, however, because my life has been substance free.

Wait. That sounded like I've been doing drugs over the last few weeks. Which I haven't. Really. 

Anyway, it's a pretty steadfast rule that the substance components of my life and blog are inversely proportional. Can somebody graph that for me? I seem to have lost my TI-85 graphing calculator.

What I'm trying to say, unsuccessfully it would seem, is that I've been really busy the last few weeks. It's been a mixed bag which has included: attending a wedding, doing a bunch of work on our rental unit, performing the Odyssey at a high school in Hinsdale, and, most importantly, finally finishing our damn album.

That's right. The ostensible original reason for this blog has finally reached a conclusion.

Over the last few weeks, we've listened to several different mixes of the album and offered Dave, our patient engineer and chaperone, our disparate feedback on said mixes.

Example:
Doc: Dave, I think the kick drum is too loud in "Darkness."
Barret: Dave, I can't hear the kick drum in "Darkness."
Aoife: There are drums on "Darkness?"
Joe: Can we talk about the vocals again?
Dave (pretending to twist knobs and type on keyboard): There... I cut the 1.5 mhz .25 db and increased the flob-fer 698 CX effect.
Band together: Sounds a lot better!!!

You get the idea. Somehow, it came down to two Sundays ago at about 10:00 in the evening. We had reached about the fifth hour of tweaking and massaging these 9 tracks we had started working on over a year ago.

Suddenly, we realized it: there was nothing left to do. All of us were sufficiently happy (or perhaps insufficiently unhappy) with how it all sounded.

We. Were. Done. Last Thursday, Barret and Doc took the final mixes to Colossal Mastering in Bucktown and the talented Dan Stout added the final layer of audio post-production called mastering. Mastering adds the final polish, brings the volume of the CD up, cleans up the beginnings and ends of the tracks, and fixes any problems. Dan is a pro, probably the most in-demand masterer in the city, and the fact that he was impressed with the quality of both the sound and music was a good sign. Also a good sign was the fact that it only took 3 hours to master our disc instead of the estimated 5, largely because Dave had done such a good job with the mixes that there was little for Dan to fix.

So on Friday, I popped by Doc's and got a copy of the final, mastered product. Gina and I drove around and listened to it from beginning to end, and let me tell you... It sounds amazing. I'm not one to be big on my own work as I am hypercritical of myself, but I really believe we have something special here.

The thing I'm most proud of is that the album has a sound and it is the sound of Burn Rome Burn. This album could have only been made by the four of us, with all our various tastes and influences. There are moments that, even after hearing them literally thousands of times in the last year, give me chills. There are moments where I think "Only Burn Rome Burn would do that." There are moments that scare me and make me nervous.

But most of all, there are moments that make me think we are building a body of work, an ouvre that will continue to grow and develop but always sound like us. Like Burn Rome Burn. And this sound has come out of the last two and a half years of late nights in our rehearsal studio, out of shows we played to a dozen people in Cleveland on a Tuesday night, out of fighting with each other, out of making up, out of drinking and laughing together, out of disagreeing, out of weekends in the studio, out of care, out of just being us...

Tomorrow morning Barret and I are going to the CD duplicators to put the duplication process in motion. We'll likely have the CD in hand in three weeks.

So I'll let you all know when you can get your copy of Burn Rome Burn's first full-length album: Bottle Boy

jbg