Any project takes longer than you expect, especially when it’s a creative one. This next video update is simple, but documents a major gap of time between the start of recording bass and acoustic guitars to finishing them. What happened during the gap, you may ask? We’ll let you know in the next post. (Unless you can guess.)

Now that your kids are crying at the news of Santa Claus quitting his job, we have some good news you can share with them. As you’ll notice in the right column, we’ve just released our new single Made In The USA! You can download a digital file from Bandcamp for $1, which includes a two-part interview with Starlite Radio and mixer Paul Redel about the recording and production of the song. And we’ve also thrown in the chord chart so you can play along! Santa Claus quitting ain’t such bad news after all.

» Free audio download of Santa Claus Quit His Job

We also made the decision to take Made In The USA off the album and record it as a single. We thought we’d do a simple acoustic version, but it turned into something more. This made it more creatively exciting for us, but added a few more weekends to the pre-album project. We just wrapped up the mixing and mastering in early November, and plan to release it right before Christmas as a pre-album teaser.

With all of this going on, the video updates took a back seat. But today, as a Thanksgiving treat, we have a new video update for the whole family! So turn off the game and Christmas music, grab a second helping of pumpkin pie, and enjoy our new (five-month old) video update!

The next vlog update features Jordan and David during the first weekend of recording drums. They deemed themselves The Buffalo Brothers since Jordan related buffaloes to drums and bass, noting they are both “beefy and rumbly.” I had a lot of fun sitting back and watching The Buffalo Brothers work together, and was impressed with David’s playing. I’ve never had the chance before to observe him singled out like I did, and I became a huge fan of David’s ability, style and endurance.

The Buffalo Brothers chose to record all the songs from our song pool that David was most familiar with, and they hammered out 10 songs in two days. (I may be off a song or two on the quantity.) They endured a lot of sweat and one late nite, but ended with some fantastic results. The project got rolling with a strong start, both beefy and rumbly.

At the end of April we started working on the control room for our makeshift, farmhouse studio. This would be the final stage of preparation before beginning to record. Jordan packed up all the equipment from his home studio, along with new speakers and a snake we purchased, and headed out to Littlebeck Farm with David.

When Jessica and I arrived the next day, it was the first time Jessica got to see the guesthouse set up for recording. There’s a nice couch and easy chair on one side of the control room with a coffee table and rug, and all the recording equipment on the other side.

Over the next week, I put together some photos from the past few years to have on the wall, and we added a coffee maker and some books to help spark creativity. It’s become one of my favorite rooms of any place I’ve been. It’s comfortable, a great place to hang out, and fun, creative workspace. My brothers and I found ourselves acting more like twelve-year-olds than professional musicians (but I’m guessing that a lot of musicians become professionals so they can act like twelve-year-olds most of the time).

On Sunday, May 15, we started recording the scratch tracks. Scratch tracks are the basic vocal and rhythm instrument tracks recorded and used as reference for a song that will later be redone. There were some technical difficulties in the morning, but we still finished all the scratch tracks for 13 songs by the end of the day.

We laid the foundation for both the workspace and the song recordings. The following weekend we started on the drums. Stay tuned for the next update.