What's the plan, band?

It's a Nick Drake type of October Tuesday morning... as somehow my copy of Pink Moon has gone AWOL. Guess I'll have to score the day myself, with Mr. Drake as my muse.

Anyway, this past weekend was a good one, all around. Friday, we met up with a group of friends at Da Sero, a Mexican place on West Randolph, for some dinner, and proceeded to a wine bar for some drinks afterwards. The occasions celebrated were a visit from our friends Leslie and Matt (from Florida), and Matt's 30th birthday.

After a long day of teaching on Saturday, I took the Metra down to Grand Ave., and we met my parents, sister, and sister's boyfriend Will for dinner. The occasion celebrated was my sister receiving a no-strings-attached grant for a year's worth of college tuition and books. Good times indeed.

Sunday found me running a couple of errands and then settling in to watch the Bears defeat the Ravens. I also stopped by Aoife and Barret's to say hello and go over a couple of band-related things. The happy couple had just returned the night before from their honeymoon in England and France, and seemed happy with the trip as well as with finally being home.

We discussed (and I think decided) to adopt a slightly modified plan for Burn Rome Burn over the next six months. As I've mentioned a few times over the last few weeks, we've been having some professional disagreements with our manager about how to release Bottle Boy. We want to release it all, as is, as a full length album, whereas our manager wants us to break it into two separate EPs (shorter releases). He'd also like to see us spend a little more time tweaking it artistically, but that's not going to happen.

Anyway, he has his reasons for promoting the "two EP" strategy, and the best one is that he's going to be shopping our music to record labels, and if a label is interested, he wants to have more material to give them. Which is a sentiment I've heard a lot in the business: you always want something more in your pocket to show people.

So I was thinking (read: brooding) about this over the past week, and I hit upon this idea: by the time the album is in our hands, we have a "hard release date," put on a big CD release show, get CDs to record people, and have the record people actually listen to the CDs, it'll be 4 to 6 months from now. In that time, we're going to get back to working on new material, pick 2-4 tunes from the huge batch I've written, and spend a weekend in a really nice studio in Chicago laying down these 2-4 tunes, working quickly, trying to implement a lot of what we learned over the course of recording Bottle Boy.

So when all the record companies come to us begging for more material (wink), we'll have another EP for them to swoon over. Is it a risk? Sure. We've never written or recorded anything that quickly. But I figure the worst that happens is that we have a high-quality demo of new material. I'm hoping to lay down a couple of acoustic tunes, too, and maybe include one of them on the EP.

One of the big problems I've experienced in previous bands I've been in and seen in a lot of "local" bands, is that it's really hard to get going again after you finish a full length. You've put all your time, energy and money into this project and suddenly it's done and... it's hard to get back into the studio again. So this strategy should remedy that situation, challenge us to write and record in a new paradigm, and satisfy our manager's concerns.

Now there's just the little matter of actually making it happen...

jbg