Just thought I'd post a few of my thoughts on "Great" to the End now that everything is done. Overall, I'm content with how it turned out. The release was relatively smooth and everything for the most part went as planned. It's crazy, but this album has been floating around for about 8 months. We first came up with the idea for Great back in September. From September to early December, I was writing Great while we were still a relatively young band. We were just starting out, and working with a group again was a major change of pace for me. I remember having some adjustment issues and frustrations while trying to get the new songs down. I finished writing Great in early December, and that for the most part made the anxiety go away. It's weird to look back now and know exactly where a certain song came from and what I was feeling at the time. I remember writing "Paralyzed Ghost" about these terrifying sleep paralysis episodes I was having back in November (at LEAST 3 times a night there) and writing "Jaimie" about a girl who just 2 months ago became my girlfriend (hi Julia). We originally planned to have Great release way earlier than it actually did. We would get started on a single, release it, and then take a break... a long break. It was just really difficult to balance what was going on outside the band with our shows and practices. Adding recording time to that was a pain, so we had to wait for little windows of opportunity to get work done. It was pretty spaced out though, and we only ran into a little bit of a crunch in the last week of edits. Unfortunately, I think that both "Grind Work" and "We Are Alive" were negatively affected by that. I love both of those songs, especially Grind Work, which was mostly Andrew's Composition. Given a little more time, I know I could have done something, but right now the recorded versions fall short. I'm pretty happy with the overall Great mix, but I believe there are things I could have done better. Next time around, I'm going to really focus on the vocals and making sure they really stand out. On Great they could have used a boost and maybe a little less reverb. We'll be making a few more show rounds to support Great and sell the rest of those CDs, but we're pretty much done with it and ready to move on. I'm very excited for what we'll be doing next. We've already been working on it for some time. We're nicknaming it "Stage II" for now. The goal is to adapt and evolve our sound; to create something different but still familiar. That's all I'm going to say about that for now, but it's important for us to keep trying new things: that way we avoid getting stale. That's the blessing of being indie though right? Being able to try something new dammit.
-Nelson
