Today, I hung nine original paintings on the wall at the eternally cool Logan Parlor space. Each painting is based on a Highway Gothic song (pictured above: "Subourbon," "Teflon," "Badlands"). They'll be on display for the first three months of 2019. 

Each painting is 12" x 12", acrylic on board, and priced at $100, with proceeds going to the first pressing of Highway Gothic; the price includes a CD and download. We'll also have some giclée prints available.

It will not have escaped your attention that the paintings are the same size as LP jackets. Hopefully we can do a vinyl pressing later, with "Badlands" and "Lost in America" inside the gatefold; at nearly an hour, it'll have to be a double album anyway, so we might as well exploit that for graphic design. Side 4 will probably include a handful of newer songs that don't have any other home, like "Lie" and "Windowsill." But that's a few thousand dollars away, so...for now, enjoy the paintings.

ICYMI: the first single from Highway Gothic is now available, with a full video and everything.

As its single art, "White Flag" uses a 12" x 12" acrylic painting on board. I'm painting one of these for each of the tracks on the album, and they'll be available to people who support the vinyl release next year.

In refining album mixes and percussion sounds, Charlie discovered that "Lost in America" had the exact same bpm as Duran Duran's "Girls on Film." He went ahead and created a mashup, using Duran Duran's drums and our everything else. Here's a sample.

I've been listening to the early mix of Highway Gothic, which is just ridiculously exciting. Almost no one plays "their" instrument exclusively on this: we have vocals from Zach; I jumped onto bass, baritone guitar, keys, and banjo at various times; Charlie drummed and played keys and bass in addition to lead guitar. I'm probably omitting a few.

It reminds me of one of the best things we ever did in Loudness War rehearsal, which was Not My Job Day. I forget whose idea it was or why we did it, but for that day's rehearsal no one was allowed to play their usual instrument or sing their usual leads. The room had keyboard, banjo, ukulele, violin, sitar, harmonica, melodica, and mandolin in addition to the standard drums/bass/rhythm/lead lineup.

We slogged through our set, knowing it would sound weird and loose and letting that be okay. We laughed a lot, because what else can you do if you've never played a banjo before? But we also discovered that we had way more versatility than we'd been taking advantage of. I can't speak for what other people discovered about their own abilities—sitar may have been the only instrument Charlie didn't already know—but I learned plenty. I tend not to approach keyboard as an improvisational player, and it turned out that I could improvise okay. Zach had never played guitar in our lineup before, and we learned he's really good at it. At the end, with him on lead and me behind the drum kit, the band wrote two new songs. Together. Which had never happened before.

I don't have a great name for that mindset, beyond maybe "creative goofing." But I think it's one of the best things you can do, either as a solo artist or in an ensemble.

Got a new song, "Windowsill," Homebrew edition. I don't think this one is destined for the album, though it may surprise us.

Apart from the handclaps and snaps (which I did by, y'know, clapping and snapping), all the percussion loops on this track were created with a guitar. The high pattern is the B and E strings, muted at the tenth fret. The low thud is an open palm lightly hitting the bridge pickup; then the track is doubled and one version is fed through a low-res filter. The bass guitar (my Hofner in drop-D tuning) also doubles that rhythm, which adds to the thunkiness.

​If we ever do get this one into the studio, I'd love to add some true drums, probably with some Adam Ant–style heavy tom beats. But one thing at a time.

I'm finishing up the rough cut of the video for "White Flag," which we shot back in April at the Den. It's been an interesting education. The principles of video editing and visual storytelling haven't truly changed since I was a film student. The tools of video editing, though, have changed entirely. Credit where it's due: the Final Cut Pro interface is really quite intuitive for someone with years of catching up to do.

I should have the final version up soon, but in the meantime, here are some favorite stills from the shoot (which, like the studio recording, features guest Baguette Scott Cupper on French horn).

This was the plan, anyway. I wound up starting with "The Climate Change Song," and skipping "Candy" and "This Is Where I Get Off," both of which have solos that make me irrationally nervous.

Adding to the nerves: the discovery, during sound check, that my shoes made for imprecise stomping on my new loop pedal, occasionally causing effects like doubled tempos (which will turn an alt-country song industrial in a hurry). I wound up just taking off my shoes before "The Age and the Ache" and doing the rest of the set barefoot.

I do really like the new pedal, despite still being in the steep part of the learning curve. Being able to set a "drum" beat by tapping my bridge pickup is cool as hell, and it adds a ton of depth and flexibility to my sound when I'm playing without the band. 

AND SPEAKING OF BANDS (smoothest segue ever!), both Claire and the Bears and Brad Bru & The Crowd Goes Wild completely tore it up on Saturday. I'm going to be upset if Brad's new power ballad, "The Wings of an Eagle," doesn't find its way into a comedy soundtrack.

Charlie and I wrapped up the main recording for Highway Gothic yesterday. There are still some riffs and patches to do here and there, but the bulk of the album is done.

My favorite sound from the session was one I wasn't sure we were going to be able to produce, a low, fuzzy, cello-ish drone I got by playing a baritone guitar (this one) with an e-Bow. My first attempt was on my Hofner, whose strings aren't optimally placed for e-Bow work, and when I switched to the resident P-Bass, the resulting noise was a screech several octaves above what we wanted. But Charlie had just finished recording the "Subourbon" solo on the baritone, and he suggested that we give it a shot. And oooeeee, did it work.

A funny thing: the e-Bow sound sustains for the entire song, and it's all on one string, which means you're pretty much stuck with whatever finger you put down first. On the take we kept, that was my middle finger. So yes, we're referring to it as the middle-finger guitar line. Appropriately, it underscores "Gen X." 

We also did some work on "Lost in America," which meant I got to listen to the incredible guitar textures Charlie created by layering lines of high, muted picking through a delay pedal. It's really gorgeous stuff, not least because by the end it's completely divorced from what you expect a guitar to sound like. It fades off into the horizon and you can't tell what instrument is even playing. (We were expecting to use a synth pad until he played this.) I can't wait until everyone else gets to hear it.

On Monday night I visited the open mic night at the Store, one of my favorite venues in Chicago (not least because the sound is so good). Another reason to love it is that Garrett, the audio tech, records everyone's sets. Here's The Climate Change Song, as played on Garrett's guitar. You can't quite hear the audience's echos of "fucking twat!" but you can definitely hear me laugh in response.

Just posted a new demo, "One Two," over at ReverbNation. I already know that a couple of lyrics are going to change, but...fundamentally, this means I'm done with the songwriting part of Highway Gothic. 

Since Charlie's already starting on some drum tracks for the studio version of "One Two," we're getting pretty close to done with the recording part as well. Current track listing:
Subourbon
Slinky
Lost in America
Bender
One Two
White Flag [end of side A for the vinyl version]
Teflon
Gen X
After All
The Age and the Ache
D.G.A.F.
Badlands

That's front-loaded with the dancy stuff, and I can see a couple of other likely problems with flow, so the order will probably change a bit. (Like, almost certainly, "Bender" should be on side 2, and "The Age and the Ache" on side 1. And then we move "One Two" after "Teflon." Though...hmm.) The only thing to do is to put it in a car stereo and listen to it a few times through while driving around. 

Most of these songs are posted in demo form on ReverbNation. Some have changed a lot in their studio versions (for "Teflon," Charlie created an amazing percussion texture out of modem noise); some, like "White Flag," just got a bit more instrumentation. Anyhow, it all means we are zeroing in on a summer release date, and that is flipping terrifying and great.