We’ve been at Zdar’s studio, Motorbass, in Paris for almost 3 weeks now and we’re getting pretty close to done and ready to mix. It’s all been great so far. We’ve finished 3 songs with rough mixes and I think they sound amazing. It’s been super cold in Paris and snowing some but really pretty. We’re staying in a nice area called Montmarte. I’ve also eaten a lot of cheese, it’s insane. Hopefully we’ll be done in a couple more weeks.
Last summer we really opened up with writing and things just started coming together. We were all excited and happy. Within a month we had written loads of new demos. And the songs were all very different. Everything just seemed open, we were freer than we had been and trying lots of things we hadn’t in a long while. It’s more like when we were kids and you just wanted to get into everything that was exciting. On ‘People’ we tried to focus in on a definitive sound from one end of the album to the other to create a unified record in that way. But ‘Echoes’ had been something else it was more all over the place and it’s unity was in the connections it made. I feel like we’re going back to that place.
Usually these things take a long time for us. It takes a while before we really click in to knowing how the record should be made. But once we know where we are, things happen quickly. We spoke with Zdar on the phone and right away it seemed like he had the right feel. We wanted someone who was going to preserve the rough edges and some of the live-ness of the demos. He got it and so in December, not long after we first spoke, he flew over to Brooklyn and we tracked for a week at Kemado studios. We tracked 15 songs there. Most of my drums were done then. So, for me the studio now is a lot more relaxed. I have been doing a lot of percussion and cymbal overdubs but I get to mostly hang back and try and get a better perspective on how things are coming together… and eat cheese. It’s insane.
But, I’m still not sure about what the album as a whole is. It’s really hard to tell looking from the inside out. Haven’t been able to step far enough away yet to see the whole thing if you know what I mean. It still seems closer to Echoes to me because we are working with a broader base of songs and ideas again. And it does feel a lot more like us as a band playing together than in the records we made in the past. To try and get the right vibe, we have purposefully tried not to edit as much and have also not done a crazy amount of takes.
I’m always concentrating on whatever track we are working on but in the back of my head there is always the thought about how it will work on the album. On Echoes I spent a long time really trying to figure out how to sequence the record and trying to get all the different ideas to feed into one another. Some people really gave us a hard time about it but other people thought it was great. On this album though we have left most of the responsibility of how the songs will work together as an album in the capable hands of Zdar.
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