Alive As You Are is out in the UK

And that calls for a few words on the record, how we made it, and on the product we're flooding the marketplace with, o informed consumer.

The LP bears a AAA code on the back (and when I say LP, I'm talking vinyl). You used to see these codes on CD's back in the 80's and 90's. It was designed to tell you how the CD was recorded (first letter), mixed (second letter) and mastered (third letter). For instance, AAD would mean a record was recorded analog, mixed analog, and mastered digitally (of course if it's on CD, it's digital and therefore the third letter would always be D). But those codes more or less vanished by the turn of the century. Fast forward to present times, when every band and their grandmother presses vinyl and touts it as the ultimate listening experience. In our neighborhood alone, two record stores have opened in the last year or two that only sell new vinyl. It's poppin' off. Except there's one caveat. If you recorded your album digitally, then it's meant to be listened to digitally (although someone on some message board somewhere might argue that this point is arguable). Once you go digital, it's always digital, and regardless of if it's on vinyl or not, your brain will be fed discrete little bits of data that sounds a lot like music instead of the continuous sound that is music. This vinyl revival hasn't been accompanied by renewed use of SPARS codes (as it's called; although it was never intended for LP's in the first place), so we usually don't know how these records were actually recorded, mixed and mastered; but I reckon that at least 95% of that new, shrink-wrapped $18 vinyl was recorded on a computer. Which means, at least in these eyes, your money might be better spent on the CD. But maybe you have a DJ night, and it's important to you to spin vinyl, who knows.


Anyway. Back to the AAA on the Alive As You Are LP. What this means is that we recorded the whole thing onto tape, mixed it onto another tape, and took that to Pete Lyman at Infrasonic Sound, whose very special needle etched grooves into what is now the vinyl platter you can hold in your hand (or, simply, he mastered it). Without any digitalia in the way, what comes out of your speakers is essentially a direct transfer of energy from us to you. All vibration and impulses. A more human listening experience. When we thought about our favorite records and what kind of record we wanted to make, we realized the common thread is they were pretty much all made this way. And here we are.

Why doesn't everybody do it like this? Well, it's easier to do every step of the process digitally, it's cheaper, it's more forgiving, you can "fix" mistakes and poor performances, studios are set up that way, people can't really tell the difference... and the list goes on and on. Digital production is insanely compelling, and it takes a lot of practice and discipline to lay it down, warts and voice cracks and all, on tape.

So yeah. After we were done tracking at Hyde Street in SF, we packed up and went an hour north to Prairie Sun, in Sonoma County and mixed for the next 10 days. It was our engineer Drew, our producer Nick, and us all crammed in this fishbowl of a control room around a mixing board turning knobs and moving sliders. Which is not textbook mixing, by the way, and was tense and not fun more often than not. But it worked - we mixed it on our own the way we wanted to do it, onto tape, and that is what's on the record.

The CD's different. When we turned the record in to our label, they said "hey, some of these mixes sound wack, let's have a professional remix em." So we transferred all the tapes onto a hard drive and got a guy named Jason Lader to mix it over a couple weekends at Rick Rubin's house in the hills on the days Kid Rock wasn't there, and I'm pretty sure he broke into it, because he made it out like we weren't supposed to be there and swore us to secrecy (oops). Since these mixes were bound for the CD (and iTunes/etc), to hell with all that analog self-righteousness; song by song, we picked the better mix, and five of his mixes are on the digital version.

All that said, what's so very nice is that when you buy the vinyl, you get a download code. Which gets you the digital version too. Best of both worlds. So there. If your neighborhood general store doesn't have it, you can order it here or here, or if you want to drop some Sterling on the CD here.

*** note: if you can't find the vinyl in the UK, order it from Dangerbird and they'll ship it straightaway ***

You can't always get what you want

It's only fair that Priceline would eventually dump us in some post-apocalyptic tenement camp sooner or later, to appease the hotel gods and karmically account for the palatial accommodations we've been scoring on the cheap for the last month. And what better place to do that than Baton Rouge. In case you were thinking of staying there, here are some observations on the Extended Stay America hotel on beautiful Corporate Blvd.:

Your first impression is the hotel staff. Combative and unfeeling, it's your first encounter with a trend you'll experience fully in your stay in town: nobody cares. Living to fight another day is top priority here, and that doesn't involve making sure your stranger ass is comfortable. The second thing you notice is that your room key doesn't work. You notice this because you can't open the door. So you go back to the front desk. You think about taking the stairs, but you fear you'll run into a week-old corpse, so you don't. Then the third thing you notice is the tawdry, melodramatic porno-style "oh-my-god-yes-don't-stop" moaning coming from room 328. Sure, it's hot, more or less, but it'll give you second thoughts about sleeping in your bed later. The lady shows up to let you in the room, advising that if you need to leave the room at some point, to just prop the door open, it'll be fine, and that's when you're knocked on your back by the fourth thing you notice, which is that the room smells exactly like a Long John Silver's bathroom. Reeks, to the point of suffocation. It's too cold to open the windows, so you turn the wall-unit fan on, until you notice it's full of Chee-tos and cigarette butts, so you turn it off. Then you notice too late that there's no toilet paper, and when you move to call the front desk, you notice the phone doesn't work. Not that you would wanna put your face anywhere near that thing. You look under the bed to make sure it's plugged in, which it is, but you stop looking as soon as you notice one solitary Dorito resting on top of a bar of half-used soap. You're tempted to just wipe your ass on the wall like everyone else seems to have done, in noticing the sixth or seventh thing, which is that every square inch of surface is smeared with traces of past habitation - schmutz, gunk, greasy handprint here, bloody footprint there. You're glad you didn't bring your black light. You turn on the TV with your sleeve and try to tune all this out to what may or may not have been some Sharon Tate B-movie. The cable's kinda scratchy. You notice the smoke detector's been violently pried from the ceiling. You think about the couple in 328, and you think about sleeping on the floor, until you consider the state of the carpet, so you re-consider the bed, and for some reason get so consumed with the whole thing that you check the sheets for bedbugs, and whaddaya know, you find stems of snapped dry spaghetti and hair commingling, and this is why you brought your sleeping bag: to sleep on the bed, in your own sleeping bag. You don't have any choice but to use their pillow, so you suck it up and lie awake, face-up, unable to breathe, because you're sleeping in a Long John Silver's bathroom.

All hope that things will be different in the outside world will be dashed in the morning. At Starbucks, the counter lies beneath a half-inch of standing water, and no one cares. The guy in front of you pleads for them not to make his drink with milk, which elicits the response of "we don't make it with milk, we add it after." The clerk at the convenience store combatively insists that she is not charging you significantly more than the advertised price, doesn't care to check, and doesn't care what you think. You ask the cashier at McDonald's how she's doing, and she looks you dead in the eyes and asks "do you really wanna know?"

You don't need this blog to rehash how and why things reached this point and how to fix them. If you're looking for the short end of the stick, it's here. And really, you can't entirely blame these people for being focused on little more than their own day-to-day survival. Shit's bleak.