Hey Paco!

It's a lazy day in MOGworld as Irene has been downed by a mediocre 2am cheeseburger that didn't agree with her (damn you Gramercy!) and I'm just flat out beat. We enjoyed seeing the entire MOG collective last night for the KIDD's birthday; however I am sad I missed Dan Hamill lapdance both men AND women. I'm sure all I have to do is ask...

With Irene asleep, I've just finished watching Serpico, completing my inadvertant study of old school Al Pacino movies. GodDAMN, he was so good when he was young! I also used this weekend to catch up on recent Korean cinema. I watched first watched NATURAL CITY, which was described to me as the Korean BLADE RUNNER. Sure enough, it's almost the same plot, just with a few different twists, and not neary as good a film as Ridley's masterpiece. However, it looked fantastic, it was bloody and violent and I had fun watching, but it lacked substance. Next up was the highly recommended 2009 LOST MEMORIES which was pretty good, but not the classic I was told it was going to be. It had an interesting plot, but it meandered on. Plus it was shot on video, which was a big problem for me. However, I think Korea is the next big center of action movies, they just need to focus more on the stories and characters cause the directors are quite good and the ideas are very original (except when they're ripping off BLADE RUNNER).

Anyway, I made two pit stops into the studio this weekend and here's what went down:

LENINGRAD, originally known as TWO BASS, has finally been edited down to an acceptable length. It's original running time was over 7 minutes and after some rough vocals and some notes from Ash, I realized that this song would work better as an instrumental at a shorter length. Brandt and I had gone over the changes a few weeks ago with Ash and I pointed out what I planned to do, but I made sure to give myself some time to go over the track to make sure those changes are right. I got in front of the computer and it got it down very quickly to about 4 minutes plus change. It's tight now and I think it's going to work out great when we have the final drums in there.

Yesterday marked, in my mind, a pretty historic moment as for the first time Brandt asked me to record HIM playing guitars. Usually he just goes and does his own thing, unless we're jamming or writing, but he's never asked me to play producer for his guitar playing till now. Due to a computer crash some months ago, some of the parts to THE MORNING AFTER THE LIFE BEFORE has to be re-recorded, and then several other parts had to be re-recorded to fit Ash's new basslines. I recorded a LOT of Brandt and all of it was quite awesome. The song rocks, and like every other song, it's going to blow up when we have the final drums in there.

I don't think Brandt has much left to do other than re-track a few things here and there, but then its on to the final drum editing. Once he's done with that, I'll start on the final vocals. We've started to talk about HOW to release this album, and right now we're leaning towards putting it out ourselves just to avoid the problems I've had over the years with labels. I'm at that age where the record deal means less and putting out a finished album that I'm 150% happy with means more.

Now I must make soup!

F