New Caffeine Sunday album progress update - 25/06/07

It's now been three weeks since my son was born (He's an awesome little bundle of snuggliness and mustard poop, and my daughter is loving having a brother too). Actually, we're all pretty exhausted at my house. Feeling good, and nowhere near as run-over-by-a-steamroller-feeling as we were when our daugher was born (nearly two years ago), but pretty tired nonetheless. It's like we're not allowed to sleep at night or something. ;-)

But that doesn't matter. Work and life are carrying on, and recording work on the new Caffeine Sunday release is carrying on, too.

Ryan and I are meeting this week to jump back into the recording process. I have some time booked off from work at the beginning of July. Between spending time with the family, helping out at home, and knocking off a steadily-growing list of smallish-scale projects around the house, I am also hoping to dive into the recording of the remaining basic tracks and overdubs for the remaining songs in line for the new album. (Ryan also has some time off at the same time, so that works out perfectly). I think we're also working on some pre-production ideas for some upcoming videos to follow Low (which was released on YouTube last month).

Lots still remains in terms of planning what this album will look like, but most (I'd guess two-thirds) of the music has been recorded already and basic tracks/scratch tracks for the rest have also been started. IMHO, this is going to be a fantastic sounding Caffeine Sunday album. These songs are sounding really cool! But we need to finish working on recording the tracks and settling on arrangements, etc before I start the real mixing work. Ryan will be madly working on video stuff. We still need to come up with the artistic direction for the photography, presentation and related goodies for the new album (I have some ideas).  And a plan for releasing the album. And then there's the small matter of rehearsing the new material for live shows. And so on. Anyone who has recorded and released their own CDs will know what a gigantic pile of work they end up being...

Anyway, I hope that in the coming weeks we'll have the music tracks finished. If my kids let me!

cn

Did I say 'Video Hits' three times or something?

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that Video Hits was a big part of my pop music education growing up in smalltown Alberta in the age before the Internets....I must have mentioned the name Video Hits three times a la Beetlejuice because now another Canadian synth group is talking about the same thing!

In a feature article just published on CBC.ca, Montreal electro duo Chromeo (who are really cool, in a "we're even more '80s than you" sort of way!) talk about growing up watching Video Hits.

Read the CBC article here

cn

"Operating, generating, new life, new life..."

On Friday, June 1, my wife gave birth to our second kid (a son, Jason). We're ecstatic and exhausted, although it hasn't been nearly the tidal wave of emotional drainage we experienced when our daughter arrived. A good thing, I think. That said, babies are fun, but they really wear you out (yes, they wear out the dads too). It will be interesting to see how things go with an almost-two-year-old and a newborn in the family, and to see how much their personalities are the same, and different.

CS recording work will resume in a week or two. If you hear a screaming baby in the background of our songs, you'll know where they came from...

cn