The second round of vocals went way better than I had hoped. We started at 9:00 am, and even with me and Ed Rose locking ourselves out of the studio, we made good time. Good thing that hammer and screwdriver was close, we took that mug of it’s hinges. I focused only on the fast tune since the beginning part was throwing me off so bad. The thing is, I couldn’t figure out why this beginning part was so hard to nail. I figured if I could make Give them Rope come together it would be a piece of cake. But the thing is, these new songs aren’t a wall of sound, so just blasting in 5/5 wasn’t going to do it. It wasn’t enough to fit some vocals, it had to move with the song and be as dynamic as the riff itself. No short order, but after a couple of weeks of rewriting lyrics, and vocal patterns, it came out better than I could possibly hope. When Jes compliments something I do, I know that I nailed it.

We settled on a title for the project, and it’s titled “Salt and Passage”. In short it’s a commentary on transition in one’s life, spiritually . Track titles are “Son of son of Man”, and “I am this”. We are still working on the video portion of this project, and think we have it all figured out, but I simply have been focusing on the lyrics and excercising my lungs so that the recording time goes smoothly. I have come to grips that I am 32. This didn’t use to be hard. But the payoff seems to be much greater now when the songs get completed.

The resinging of “thank you” and “that’s the way” for the repress/compilation of all covers for “There is nothing new under the sun” is finally mixed and put to bed. Hydrahead will be putting that on the calender soon enough. It’s the original Zeplin record, but with all the stray covers we did on seven inches combined with new art by Aaron Turner. It’s so exciting not to cringe when I hear those soft songs with those awfully sung lyrics. It’ll be a shock to most who are used to the old versions. Again, the old versions will be included on the Cd. I doubt that vinyl will be done for this record again, but that’s going to be a HH decision.

Click one to hear a sample.
That’s the Way
Thank you

The final song is going to be completed this month on the 30th, and then we move on 100% onto the video portion and the book part of the release. It’s going to actually happen, after so many Coalesce release failures, it’s so gratifying that this one is going to happen in a timely manner.

On a side note, I was a litigant on the People’s Court Tv show last year suing a manager for ripping me off, long story short, I went down in flames, but you can see it on 4/18/07. Check your local listings for People’s Court, and have a laugh. I wasn’t!

-Sean