just started working on material for the new album. since this damn thing has taken so long to make i've got more songs than i know what to do with. i've narrowed the batch down to 25 of which i'm trying to narrow it down to 12 or 13 by the end of the month.

recording starts in july. in the meantime, the band and i....currently eric on drums, chris on bass and my former producer wayne dorell on keyboards & guitar...are sorting through all the songs and trying to find out which tunes are magical and which just have a clever chord pattern that no one will care about.

the plan is this. to record the bulk of the record including vocals live. i don't mean live and then throw everything away and replace it with good takes. i mean live live. like real fucking musicians. you see for those of you who don't know, the way records are made today...trained monkeys could do it. you do it piece by piece. first the drums are recorded. then the producer clicks the mouse and the computer neatly arranges the drum performance so that its all perfect for your ears. then the bass, then guitar, then vocals, ad nauseam until you are left with that perfect vaccuum sealed tight ass sterile fucking piece of shit you sing along to on the radio. in the past i've recorded this way and i hated it although i didn't even know why i hated it. now i see the light. there is no life in those recordings. no humanity. that's because there no FLAWS. no mistakes. i want that shit. music isn't supposed to be perfect. its supposed to be fucked up. i want to hear that a live human being sat in a room and actually performed very well. not perfect. but real good. meaning he made one or two mistakes and left it.

so i'm taking a month and a half to pick the tunes, arrange them and properly rehearse them so we can go in there and do this thing the way it was supposed to be done: four musicians in a room all at once...singing, picking, strumming and drumming...with the red record light on and we will live with whatever is revealed on the recording. Mr. Jason Cupp will be producing the record. he's a good friend of ours from LA who at a young age has already worked with countless artists, most recently Jon Brion, The Elected and The Valley Arena to name a few. and we'll be doing this all in jersey.

that's all for now. its just an outline. a rough sketch. a framework. no album title. no official tracklist. no release date. not much. but a start. i'll do my best to keep a journal of the whole process as it progresses. just wanted to give you something.

as for all the recent comments people have been leaving...most of them seem to address us not touring certain spots of the country in a long time. i am sorry about this. we miss you all. once this record is done, I PROMISE we'll be back. and you'll have some new music soon to tide you over.

thanks for reading and listening.
-val