I stopped by the mad scientist Jamie’s Lidell’s studio last night to touch base with him and Al Stone - since the Sound Emporium sessions wrapped a couple weeks ago, they’ve been hard at work overdubbing vocals, tweaking arrangements and adding ear candy (when I arrived, my bro DeMarco Johnson was laying down some SWEET Stevie Wonder-style harmonica).

At Sound Emporium, our goal was capturing as much musical goodness as possible, trusting Jamie would sift through everything and getting the impression he was very much looking forward to doing so, what with him bringing a fresh armload of music-nerd orgasm-inducing gadgetry every morning (much to Eddie Spear’s delight). We were DEEP in it.

As tones and arrangements came together, it was clear the whole thing was kinda at a new level and, frankly, the lyrics and melodies needed work. They were decent enough to give the tunes shape and get the label to green light the record, but the songs had evolved into something, just, MORE and what we’d written didn’t meet the new standard. We were able to tweak some lyrics during the sessions, but it more or less fell on Allen and Jamie to hunker down after the fact and put their extremely capable heads together.

I gotta say, Al’s been killing it. He’s digging deep. One song in particular’s grown from a kinda throw away track to, like, a statement, and listening to playbacks last night I’m thinking there’s a whole lot more inside of us than we realize. I’m proud of my friend.

Lots of people are waiting for this record. There’s pressure, both from the industry (it’s their third record, it’s make-or-break time) and fans (we wanted new music fucking two years ago), and the natural reaction’s to overthink. The thing to do, really, is show people your heart, and that can be terrifying beyond words. But the band’s done that through our instruments and Allen’s doing it through his lyrics. The spiral's there to be swung on, my friends. Let's do it together.