Since our new producer was scheduled to come over the next day to commence the pre-production process for the new album, I wanted to hit the ground running and was successful in getting Chi to sit down at the kitchen table in a seemingly reasonable frame of mind with pen, paper and a list of rock-like Panache pieces to draw from as an initial planning stage for the new album that was to feature our rock repertoire.  As I fully expected, it was quite an ordeal.   

 

Listen while you read to a very rough early “thumbnail sketch” of Victory Speech”, the recording/production of which is beginning to look like a realistic possibility now.

Tuesday, 05 March 2013

After showing Chi the long list of our rock tracks that I had marked with the ones I wanted to record on this project (10 of them), I sat there robotically emitting “mm-hmm”’s as he went on and on and on, yapping at me at length, browbeating and bloviating over every single discussion point in his insistent, agitated tone of voice that drives me crazy. I find that incredibly fatiguing, particularly when he appears to be going mainly on totally unsupported assertions and assumptions, and in some cases frames what are actually intended as questions as assertions, and then gets frustrated with me when I don’t answer them (!). I felt my energy draining away like the gas gauge sucking down on our Tacoma when climbing a steep hill fully loaded with gear while thinking, “Chi. I got it five words into your tediously repetitive five-paragraph oration about that point. Can we PLEASE move on already?!” Jesus on skis….

Anyway, at the end of it all we actually managed to agree to a selection we were both satisfied with (although I thought it was a bit excessive — he insisted on 15 tracks), including the potential order and opening track that we would play for our new producer and see what he thought. Better still, it didn’t turn into a knock-down drag-out fight as these things so often do.

We came up with the following:

March for the 21st Century
Octopus!
Majesty
Resistance
I’m on the Run
Loss
Dance With Me
A Shitty Day
Pegasus
Coming or Not?
Silent Night
What Happened?
1999
Touch and Go
Victory Speech

I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about putting “Octopus!” on this album since it is so different from all of our other repertoire, and I had wanted to use it as the title track on a follow-on album with more stuff closer to that style, but Chi insisted so I relented.

I sighed in despair when he asked if I was ready to rehearse at 10:00 PM when we finally wrapped that exercise we’d begun over an hour previously, since as sleep-deprived as I already was, I did not want to be just sitting down to dinner around midnight when I had hoped to be in bed by 11:00 PM so I could not only get a reasonable amount of sleep, but also get up early to do some badly-needed woodshedding in preparation for tracking the new album. He said we’d just run the first three pieces on the list, so I said ok. The rest of the evening proceeded much as I’d thought, but thankfully with no more damaging incident than Chi throwing a fit about the condition of an avocado I had put in the salad for dinner.

 

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