Magnapop made our first step toward creating a new album yesterday. We did some pre-production work on three songs in a friend’s new demo studio in beautiful Little Five Points in Atlanta, GA.
I’m really excited to be working on this recording and look forward to making the best damn album we can. I think we’re going about the process in an intelligent way, trying to figure out how to use the studio as another instrument and not just book some time in an expensive studio and record the songs. We are practicing the recording process while it’s still cheap and will be able to use this experience and the ideas that come out of it when we go spend the big bucks. This will allow us to try more ideas and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
My last experience recording an album on this scale was way back in October, 1996 with my band Marcy. The whole band went to upstate New York for over a month and recorded/lived in this amazing studio called Sweetfish with Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Weezer, Mercury Rev) producing. It was a dream situation. We spent three weeks tracking the album and one week of mix down.
Unfortunately, the experience was a little too much for our band and the process ultimately led to our break up. The album came out, but Marcy didn’t survive and we all went on to other things. We were just a little bit too young at the time and weren’t ready to be away from our normal lives for that long and be under the pressure of creative expectations and record label politics. I think if we had recorded the album at home, we could have survived with our sanity intact. I know we all have no regrets, though, and are just thankful that we had the experience.
The Magnapop album won’t have as big a budget and no official producer, so we will be more reliant on ourselves for discipline and planning. The big difference is maturity. Magnapop have so much collective experience at this point that I am confident we can create a great album on our own. The current plan is to continue recording demos for a few more weeks and then start recording the “real” thing in February after we get the moolah from the label. We will probably be using three different studios around Georgia. I’m going to try and write about as much of the process as possible on these pages, so stay tuned.
