NOW AVAILABLE ON iTUNES

Well folks, we finally have some new material to share with you. “Someone Came to Help Me” is a tune that was inspired by patients, donor families and caregivers at The Methodist Hospital Transplant Center in Houston.

We played acoustically at a “Donate Life” event at the hospital in 2007 and 2008. Both years we performed “Here Comes the Sun” and “Let My Love Open the Door.” Both great songs, but the event really needed its own tune. I came up with the words and melody, Jeff added some chords and we played it at the 2009 event to a very enthusiastic crowd.

This song started it out as a demo with Jeff programming drums and playing acoustic guitar and me singing just trying to get something together for the folks at Methodist, but we decided pretty early on we should produce it as a band.

Jeff and Chris cut the basic tracks in October, which included organ, bass, acoustic guitar and Chris’ great electric guitar part that weaves throughout the song. When that was completed relatively quickly, we tried a number of different vocals sessions afterward trying to get the right sound, but it just wasn’t coming together. After some time away from it and listening to some Steve Earle for inspiration, I completed the vocals at end of January. Chris and Jeff did some further tweaking to the instrumentation on the song as well.

Mixing commenced at Chris’ Rogers Recording in early February and after a number of sessions to fix the groove and the acoustic guitar track, we all felt like something was missing. Was it a guitar part? Another vocal? Then Chris found a trippy keyboard sound that felt like a mixture of a bunch of different noises and that did the trick. Jeff played it all the way through, Chris added some excellent effects and it really turned the track in the right direction.

This was our first try at mixing our own material and Chris really knocked it out of the park. He upgraded his entire studio last year and it has really made a difference in the overall sound of the band. We are almost done with a bunch of songs we started last summer with drummer Leesa Harrington-Squyres, our former drummer and current drummer for Lez Zeppelin. We hope to have those ready to release digitally in the next few months.

The song is also available for download on Rhapsody, Zune, Napster, Lala, Limewire, Nokia and eMusic.

First up is what is destined to be our next big hit, “Soft Green Leaves.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzU_yS77bpk

Jeff works on drum programming. It’s tedious.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4IldFVR9yM

…from the Greek. Chris and Jeff try to explain what quantizing is with not much success.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgfHr9IrnkY

My favorite. George tries to explain to Chris the kind of drum beat he wants.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkAn6Z_A2xE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP-kaRkOTvU

The second is George singing Run Towards the Warmth of the Sun with his daughter, Julianne. Andrew plays his part by singing Chris’ guitar solo while playing the guitar from Rock Band.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiLEgsH13Hg

To quote Tom Petty, “You guys are gonna put me out of a job.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkILu0C8_4c

This is our official video for the song “Sticky Finger,” the first track off our second CD, Come and Take It. It chronicles our weeklong tour of the Northeast in October, 2008. The disc, along with our first one Another Lame Semi-Tragedy, are available on iTunes.

In our case, pre-production involves going through each song we want to record and making decisions about style, groove, sound, tempo, etc.

Last night, we worked on one of the songs and put together a couple videos with my new handy dandy little iFlip video recorder. It’s sweeter than winter molasses covered in sugar, gumballs and crushed angel wings.

The first video is some random drum stuff with a very stylish Star Wars theme intro. George Lucas directed and by George Lucas, I mean my cat, Dexter.

The second video is about how we have decided to name ourselves The Gods of “Something” with the “something” part being a variable like the X in an algebra equation or the speed of a drill. In short, we are awesome to the square root of X.

The truth is, this “pre-production” is really just time to goof off and pretend to be recording engineers. When we do this, I call Chris “Steve Albini” and he refers to me as “Daniel Lanois” because I’m dark, dirty and mysterious. George is “Bruce Dickinson” and is constantly yelling for more cowbell, which is sweet and sad all at the same time since George doesn’t know that was just a character on SNL and the real Bruce Dickinson is the singer from Iron Maiden.

As far as we know, unlike the SNL character played by Christopher Walken, the real Dickinson doesn’t put his spandex pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He has them held in place by groupies while he leaps from a table directly into them. And THAT is why we call George “Bruce Dickinson,” not because of the cowbell thing, but don’t tell him because he thinks it’s HILARIOUS.