I employ a flexible definition of 'minimal'

As of 5 p.m. today - Saturday - there are enough guitars on "Solar" to injure a small animal. So much for minimal.

Honestly, though, I could not help myself. The track captured my imagination right off that bat in a way that few do. It has a slow, funky shuffle - "When The Levee Breaks" meets "A Northern Soul"-era Verve - that lends itself to all kinds of psychadelic jamming. I layered echo-drenched 12-string parts, harmonized e-bows, wah-wah'ed funk lines. Had I the time or money for draw, this would be the track to which I would smoke.

I even added an extended track of theremin, which previously made an appearance on the "Theme From J-Bar."

Now poor F.J.'s job is to sort out the twentysomething tracks of instrumentation. My realistic expectation is that half of what I recorded will be wildly altered or removed altogether, but that is OK. While I enjoy jamming and layering parts on these songs, ultimately everyone on this record subscribes to a "song first" mentality. In other words, if the part does not work for the song, it goes. Plain and simple.

This working method also happens to be F.J.'s strong point as an arranger. I have never known him to discard a part that helped a song, and at this point in our long working relationship, I have the utmost trust in his discriminating ear. If something gets cut, it happens for a reason.

The process of arranging and cutting is also eased by the fact that there is little to no ego about individual parts among the members of this project. In all my time working on hypefactor, I have never known someone to piss and moan about their part being cut from a song. Well, there was that one time that all of F.J.'s bass parts were removed, and he went on a bender that ended with him capsizing his sailboat during the Fastnet race. But that's another story altogether...

Speaking of guitar parts, on Thursday night Ash played some sweet parts on a Gibson ES-330 in between bouts of programming. His playing really stands out, and he clearly has an instinctive ear for a good hook. Like me and Johnny Marr, Ash takes many of his cues from The Cure's Robert Smith, a fine guitarist who has never quite received his due as a player from the rock elite. Perhaps it was the hair?