Well, the budget wasn't approved. Unbelievable. I'll just put that behind me and get down to business.
It's been a few weeks without an update here, but have no fear: we are still at it! I will try and remember all the news and fill you all in. We are still slowly making progress on the recording... it grinds to a crawl when you're trying to make 2 full length albums with 2 bands that have many of the same people in them (the New Ancients and The Ringout), but we're doing our best. We actually started some vocals in the last couple weeks and got some keepers from Michelle and newcomer Leah for These Burdens and Great God. These guys have very similar voices and they are really mixing well. Michelle busted up her arm a while back but it hasn't seemed to hurt her signing which is good. Although now she can't really do those wild "over the head hand claps" she usually does during the ORB services.
So we were held up for a couple weeks because i was doing location and interview recording for a group at Princeton Seminary who is doing an audio journal type CD featuring the ORB. It was a lot of work, but fun at the same time. We basically got a 15 track live New Ancients CD out of this... that will be on the shelf for now as there are no plans to release it. The CD that Princeton is releasing will i guess have some of the songs on it along with interviews with Christian, Nicky D, Kathleen Gill, Tom Sasso, and others.
So, after that was all mixed and shipped over to Princeton we got back to work on the album. We've been acquiring instruments here at an alarming rate, so there's lots of new sounds on this recording so far. Tim, Jay Bueno and myself were working last night and we counted 17 stringed instruments down in the studio. There is barely enough room to walk in there now. Among all the goodies is a new banjo being lent to us by the great Dave Petillo. As of now, it looks like we are not going to be able to get Dave Ulrich (did banjo on the first CD) to play for quite a while. He is taking some time off of his job at the Sci-Fi channel to bike across the country with a friend. Or... at least thats what he's telling us. So in lieu of that news, we picked up a banjo and have started using it all over the place. Also new on deck is a sweet little concertina that Brian Jones will be squeezin' for some of these songs. That's coming up next session i hope. What else... more vocal work coming up too... more guest singers... getting Andy Bova to hit some drums for a few of these gems.... hopefully we'll get Pete Nilsen back for some more astounding violin work too. These songs are really some of the best work we've ever done at this studio. I can't believe how monsterous Great God is sounding.... goose bumps central.
That's enough for now. Here's a little video compilation from the last 2 sessions. More of the same here, but some nice footage of Christian acting like a buffoon towards the end. Enjoy!