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.

When the wind off the lake is slicin' through your ribs
And every curb is crowded with the chairs calling dibs
A tall dark figure comes stridin' through the snow
A mean ol' varmint, name of Roasty Joe

I wrote a joke cowboy ballad yesterday, which started me thinking about influence and whatnot, and why joke songs are so much easier to write. Last one first: it's because the pressure's off. A parody cowboy ballad doesn't have to be anything but a parody cowboy ballad. It doesn't have to anchor the album or be submitted to a prize jury. You're also, whether you acknowledge it or not, limiting your audience to people who will get the song's first few jokes—and audience specificity can be an immensely helpful tool.

Parody also means you have a blueprint: other people have already done this. "The Ballad of Roasty Joe" cribs from the Simpsons' "Canyonero" commercial (which itself cribbed from "Rawhide"), with a bit of early Johnny Cash, via "Walk Hard," and "The Ballad of Davy Crockett." (I'm sure Derek Thompson would have something to say about the familiarity of the genre predisposing listeners to like your contribution, but that's a whole other discussion.) (Also, holy WOW is that Crockett song problematic, in ways of which I was completely ignorant as a kid.) Because we already know what a cowboy ballad should sound like, you probably have a sense of it just from reading these lyrics, without even listening. 

Gatherin' the lawn chairs, pilin' up the wood
Pourin' on the kerosene, burn 'em up good
Til there ain't a dibs called on the whole North Side
Just a big ol' bonfire a city block wide

But blueprints don't write lyrics (unless, I suppose, your blueprint is for a dance song about waving your hands in the air like you just don't care, in which case: you're done; proceed directly to the bank). There are a lot of answers to the question of what does write lyrics. For me, it always comes down to meaning. I don't like empty songs, and I usually can't finish a set of lyrics unless the song has a firm central meaning. So "The Ballad of Roasty Joe" would likely have remained no more than a joke between friends at a bonfire a few months ago, had Joe himself not made a separate joke yesterday about burning dibs chairs. That's as Aristotelian as you can get: suddenly the character had a purpose and an action, and that gave the song enough meaning that I could complete it.

Who can make a fire with a single spark
Blazing to the edge of Winnemac Park?
Who can play Jenga with a burning log?
He's a coal-kickin', smoke-breathin' bonfire dog
Roasty Joe

GarageBand also deserves so much credit for making it ridiculously easy to put together things like this. (Again, the fact that this is a parody for a small audience removes a lot of pressure; I was never going to spend ages correcting pitch or mastering in Pro Tools.) The fact that I can do in an hour on my laptop what used to take my college group a thousand dollars and a full day at a studio (with a reel-to-reel!) still feels nothing short of miraculous. 

And if you go drivin' in the frozen snow
If you gotta leave a parking spot, just let it go
Don't leave your chairs out sittin' by the curb
There's a certain pyromaniac you're gonna perturb

​Here's the final thing. It's pretty silly.

I've been doing bits and pieces of this one in live sets for a few months, but after writing a few new verses I went ahead and recorded the whole thing: The Climate Change Song, dedicated to the man who is (sob) president. Definitely use headphones if you're listening to this at the office.

I'll be doing the full version in this Friday's show at the Store on Halsted. There have been a couple of gigs where this has turned into a call-and-response song, with audience members echoing the appropriate obscenity at the end of each line. I hope that becomes tradition.

We've got a new T-shirt in our Cafepress store. Ten percent of the purchase price will go to Girls Rock! Chicago, a nonprofit that teaches self-expression through music to girls, trans youth, and gender-nonconforming youth.

One of the unignorable facts of playing out is the gender imbalance of live rock music. In multiple-act lineups, I've started keeping track of the ratio; often it's 1:10 or worse. There are a lot of reasons for that, ranging from critical perceptions of the relative gravitas of rock and pop, to the prevalence of male radio DJs and other cultural gatekeepers, to the way rock instruments and gear are marketed to dudes, to tone policing of women's voices, to good old-fashioned prejudice. Anyway, once you start seeing it, you can't un-see it. Here's hoping that, in our small way, we can help balance things out.