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.