It's A Wrap

Know Eye Inn Teem wrapped it all up yesterday...almost. I realized sort of belatedly that I still need to get a vocal recording from Chelsea for "Show Me The Way," but since we work in the same office, I'm thinking I will just bring the laptop to the office one day and make her belt it out after hours. Aside from that, we are dis-banded.

Yesterday the first thing we did was to redo "All Mine." Mic had recorded a keyboard track way back in early November, but was nonetheless stymied all over again when he sat down to play it yesterday. There was a lot of fussing. Finally, a lightbulb went on: he was playing the wrong chord. Problem solved.

The recording featured me in one of my finest roles ever for the Teem: I played the cookie sheet. Yes!! The cookie sheet! When you bend the cookie sheet back and forth, it makes a waka-waka-waka sound that sounds very similar to the sound at the end of "All Mine." I was a virtuoso on the cookie sheet yesterday.

After we redid "All Mine," we redid "Qualifiers." We had layered bass and drums over guitar and voice earlier, but that was backwards. You always want to do the drums first, obviously. But since Chris is off battling third-world parasites half the time, we didn't have that option right off the bat. So Cerin had been forced to keep time while she played the guitar, and it seemed like she did a pretty good job. That is, until Chris tried to drum along to the voice/guitar track, and found himself having to speed up and slow down at points. He has a lot of skill and covered up as well as he could, but there were spots where you could hear the incongruity.

"Qualifiers" is Jonathan's song and I told him I would play the layered version for him and we could re-record it if he wasn't happy with it. He listened to about 2 measures and immediately requested a redo, and no one would blame him. But Chris made a request: could we play it TWICE AS FAST? He just thought it would be cool to play it really fast.

Jonathan, being more open-minded than me about changes to his vision (I would have said no way), said "sure," and the band was off, at near Chipmunks speed. Never again will a band member refer to this song as funereal. It's lively now!

We toyed with the idea of redoing Ann's song, "Mister Barista." Our recording had featured Chris playing our crummy yard sale drums, before we had hauled his rowing-machine-esque electronic babies to the studio. But we listened to it, and decided it wasn't bad, and were unmotivated to give the song another go.

Incidentally, Ann is working on a sequel to "Mister Barista." The original is about a cute coffee shop employee. The sequel will be about a cute British lawyer and will be called.....

"Mister Barrister." Ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Anyway, thus ended Know Eye Inn Teem's 2008 odyssey. Now it falls on me to make an album cover, and turn the tracks into songs and load them up on the disks. I think it shouldn't take too long. By the end of next weekend, there is no reason we should not be handing out our album to scores of shrieking fans. They will be shrieking in dismay, of course, not admiration, but bless their hearts, many of them will consent to listen to it, or if not we will force them. Rockstars have our means of persuasion.

The studio looks pretty empty now, without everyone's amps and instruments and sheet music and extension cords strewn all over the place. Now it's just a basement again.