last post of december/2008

I wanted to write a much more detailed post about the end of the year and all that this one entailed, which was a lot - but got distracted and decided I'd wait.

I sold the 8 track, and inherited a 4 track - so I started going through some of my tapes today.

I posted one song eddie and I recorded sometime in 2000/2001 on the message board.

then I got to the congress of the crow demo
I mean xcongressofthecrowx - we recorded 8 songs August 8, 2000. 8 - 8/8/∞
oh man. I haven't heard this since I mixed it back in August of 2000 (I'm assuming the same day that I recorded this on a 4 track).
unfortunately I lost the actual 4 track tape so we get the mixed down version, with tape warble and all.
the original cassette tape was 8 songs + the sample, which gets cut off on the tapes, but Jeremy insisted that we use it on the red heroine cd. I still don't know what movie it's from.
2 songs should be recognizable. and one other song is actually a "cover" (I don't know if that's really a cover, I wrote it) of a photograph to remember you by - the band Jarod, Jeremy, Adam and I were in at the end of 1997.

I remember recording these songs in my parent's basement, we would sneak all the equipment in while they were at work to practice and record, threaten my brother and sister not to tell on us and then leave. It worked for the entirety of the band.

Vocals were split up between the three of us, I'm mostly on the left and eddie and jeremy are mostly on the right, I think.

I couldn't scream that fast and I don't remember much of the lyrical content, so listening back to these, I am laughing at all of us!
Jeremy picked the song titles out from medical dictionaries. And for some reason put an Albert Camus quote in our linear notes - I'm pretty sure he's never read any Albert Camus outside of one-liners, and other quoted passages. "A profound thought is a constant process of becoming." which is actually a misquote as it should be - "A profound thought is in a constant process of becoming."

tracks 8+9 are from an earlier demo session/practice, I don't remember when it happened.
I don't know the song title to one song, and the other one Jeremy yells it out before we play it.
I don't really remember why or how it happened but by november we had recruited John Cheesebrew to sing for us, and resulted in the name change. I spoke of this in an earlier post. I think the practice space may have played a small part in this decision.

now that I think about it, it's possible the 8 songs were recorded on John McCormick's digital 8 track, but I don't think so - but that would explain why I don't have the original tracks/tapes - it's possible they are in my missing fire proof safe - which holds all the original recording sessions for a few bands, the test presses of all the records, and some other things, that I can't remember.

anyway, here's the demo + 2 bonus tracks.


I don't know why I haven't posted this before.
Dead Letter Auction recorded 5 songs in September 2003 with Mike Lust in Chicago at Phantom Manor.
We never released these songs, though they are floating around on the internets and stuff.
I think we didn't release them in part because Chris broke up the band again, by moving someplace silly - recording/engineering school in Phoenix, maybe? and then John got himself a family and all that - so we couldn't tour on the ep.
The bridge and the message were written with the intention of being on a split 7" with Ten Grand - that didn't happen because Matt passed away.
We wrote a few more songs and decided to record them all before Chris left us. Actually a part of the song [the Morrow] has a song that sounds an awful lot like a Ten Grand part (my guitar on the intro), and in part [the Mourning] was written for Matt, among other people and things. so this last ep was shaped very much by that.
all songs are titled with a "the" intentionally, with the last 4 being "the M_______" also intentionally.
these songs weren't exactly finished when we entered the studio. I didn't have the words written for one song, and the other I had never really sang, or even worked out the phrasing for the second half.
I love these songs a lot, and I think they showed a real promising direction that we were heading. Lyrics really sum up everything I was feeling at the time and was a perfect reflection of that specific moment as well as the band.

Dead Letter Auction - the Bridge

I found a bunch of old DLA things with some really interesting early versions of songs and such. I'm hoping to find some of the songs we didn't record in the studio. I found a tape from August 2001, I forgot that we actually had cancer of time, foreshadow, and excise written before we recorded vertigo. I knew foreshadow was that old, because the words "I want to see their buildings lay down" became an issue when 9/11 happened. anyway, these songs and things will probably get posted sometime next year.

also, I messed up January by posting 13 posts instead of just 1 -
and August I only posted 3 posts, instead of 8. but who's really counting?

last post of 2008.