Old Yellow House

The night before our buddy who engineered the recording of Hard to Swallow came to my house (where we would record all of the live tracks over the next two days), I was sitting around playing and this song just fell out. Songs seem to happen this way more than not. If the words and music just spill out, the song is generally a keeper. Conversely, I find that songs that take rewrite after rewrite never see the light of day. Well, that is, until just recently but that's a topic for an entirely different post.

Anyway - I live in "Old Yellow House." It is a row home built in 1920 that spent a large chunk of its life as a bar... and from what I understand, a damn rowdy one at that. When I'm home alone and things are still, I can hear the stories damn near coming through the spaces between the floor boards. It's not in a haunted/ghostly way, just its own personality with too much to tell. I spend hours wondering about the drunken fights and drunken love and broken hearts drowning the pain in the same room where I spend most of my time.

Whatever it was/is that spoke/speaks to me on those quiet nights... it worked. We played that song, without a drummer, to get a feel for the room and the placement of the mics. We didn't even know that Colin was rolling as we played. Matt and Eric hadn't even heard the song before, but it all came together. We wound up using the first take. And from that take on, the next 48 hours of recording went smoother than any of us could have hoped.