You’re all clear, kid! Now let’s blow this thing and go home ...

Now I feel like we're a real band. Firehouse 12 is the kind of studio I always wanted to work in.

We met up this morning with Greg Giorgio, who will be producing and engineering our record over the next month or so. He's my friend Maya's boyfriend, so I've had a good vibe about him for a while. When he came over to my studio a few weeks ago to start talking about what we all wanted, we could already see where his mind was headed and that he was the right choice for us. He records at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, and has done bands like Interpol, Mates of State, and Tokyo Police Club. More importantly, he's recorded the National, and they're one of my favorite bands of the last 5 years. I want to try to get some of Matt Beringer's vocal sound, like on Alligator, on one of Nat's new songs, so who better to make that happen! His boss is on paternity leave for the summer, so the studio's closed making Greg available. We'll see if he doesn't hate us before this is all over.

So we got all loaded in and comfortable, and left Matt to pound away for a few hours as they got drum sounds. Studio time is a lot of waiting, so Nat and our video guy RJ and I kept tabs on the voting for the contest we're in - we open for Coldplay if we win, and we're finalists, and took turns telling everyone we know to vote, shopping for studio stuff last minute, etc.

When we did Naked a few years ago, we did all of the drums in one day - a few hours of getting sounds and then WHAM! did all the songs without expecting to. That ended up leaving us with some limitations in the end, and we always wished we'd taken the second day we said we would and space it out more. This time, we have two days to do drums, already booked. Or we did.

We have 11 songs or so to record over two days. How many did we do today? One. That's not good. Once sounds were gotten, Greg and Matt ended up re-writing the drum line for the song we started playing, so there was a bit of re-learning for Matt and that sucked up the time. Plus he was getting a bit worn out, and we had to end earlier than planned at the request of the studio. Thus, he's now a bit freaked that we have to pull a Naked all over again, if we can't book an extra day Wednesday. Can't say I blame him, I'm a bit stressed myself.