So we're here in the studio on day three. The Magpie Cage is a great place to work (as anyone in MLIW or Against Me! can attest), and J. Robbins is a great person to work with. The key to a great producer/engineer is someone who can simultaneously make everyone feel at ease, while still pushing you hard enough to get the best possible performance, which sometimes means pushing you over the edge little bit. I think its even more complicated with hardcore/punk, because a good performance involves a precarious balance between technical accuracy and unraveling chaos. He's got to get to know everyone in the band well enough to know how hard he can push before you become so unnerved that the performance starts to suffer. Add to that the fact that a lot of people (myself included), are really nervous in the studio and tend to play worse in these conditions than at shows or at practice, and also the fact that the clock is always ticking and everything needs to get done in a pretty limited amount of time, and you've got a situation with a lot of complicated variables. I'm glad that I don't have to be the one keeping track of it all.

Started doing vocals last night and blew my voice out pretty quick (after 3 songs), but it was really fun and exciting to hear the songs start to come together on tape after all these months in the basement hammering out these songs. I think we practiced more in the past 4 weeks than we did during the entire writing process for "Paradise". It's not that we were over-thinking/over-analyzing everything, but we wanted to be really sure all the arrangements were interesting (not rehashing things we've already done, and not sticking to the same old transitions and structures, like verse, chorus, verse, chorus, breakdown) and the tempos were on point. We wanted to make sure that the fast stuff is blazing, and the slow stuff sounds demented and brutal. Also, the writing process was a lot more collaborative, involving much more input from everyone, especially when it came to structure and speed. I would demo all the songs by myself at home, give them to Andy, Josh, and Jared, and then they would practice without me for a few hours, really digging into the songs, taking them apart, and putting them back together in ways that wouldn't have occurred to me on my own. Then I would listen to everything, and figure out vocal cadences and that sort of thing. This part is the worst for me, because there's a lot of waiting while the drums, bass, and guitar get recorded, and a lot of stopping and waiting for unexpected technical issues to get ironed out. I'm a really impatient person in situations like this, sitting here literally chomping at the bit. It's only because I'm so excited about this record though.

anyway, thanks for the support and interest in our band and our music, and thanks for taking the time to read my long-winded, self-indulgent rambling. Feel free to write back with comments or observations, I'll do my best to answer quickly…

much love -- Dan/P.I.B.