Day one at Willie's place!

Well we are here, after a grueling 16 hour drive which left Karen, Jeremy and myself all loopy. We arrived Saturday at noon in Austin. Blaine had a crazy Nine Pound Hammer gig in Stone Mountain (outside of Atlanta) on Saturday so he flew in and met us Sunday. We spent the night sleeping off the trip at Jeremy's parents and woke up to freshly cooked Mom Food, pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, veggies and bisquits and even Peach Cobbler. We hung out with our Austin buddies and reconviened Sunday for the requisite Mexican breakfast and later burgers at Casinos before making the trek out to Perdenales studio here in Spiceland or Briarcliff Texas, only about 30 min from Austin.

Both our condo and the studio are right on the Lake Travis so the view is beautiful. We have two balconies that both face the lake and right now I can see Turkey Vultures and little black birds slowly making circles in the sky. I'll make sure to keep moving so they don't think I'm lunch.

Blaine and Remo are at the studio already, we have to get some groceries and Blaine will probably be off to get Daniel from the airport.

It's really pretty and calm out here. And Willie Nelson's studio has a great vibe. Gordie from the band Grady and of Big Sugar fame is our engineer and he has all sorts of drum sound tricks that Jeremy is excited about.

We got everything set up last night more or less enough to get some basic sounds for when Daniel arrives. It's a groovy old place with lots of Willie charm, Gold records, pool tables and even a real reverb room tiled from floor to ceiling. We'll be recording to tape initially to try and get the fat sound of the 70's so vacant in todays compressed for ipod recordings. In the tape room there's a reel labeled 'Willie and Frank' and yes, Frank means Sinatra. Pretty awesome company we're keeping here.

Unfortunatley the olympic sized swimming pool at Willie's has been filled in. Insurance reasons and such. Pity, we all bought our trunks, and I even trimmed the hedge! Still the studio is spacious and has lots of escape rooms for anyone to go off and 'concentrate'. Basically Blaine has lots of places to write lyrics and come up with good silly stuff to sing about.

So day one is underway, we're all anxious and excited about getting some stuff down to hear how it sounds.

In the last few weeks cramming with Daniel in Atlanta we've managed to nail down 12 originals for this new titleless album. Most of them are so fresh they won't be fully baked until we get them on tape. We've been tweaking and altering them everytime we play them so nothing is even remotley stale. We'll be recording live, as usual, with Jeremy enclosed in the drum room so we can watch what he does but won't have to smell his farts! (We all need our own rooms for that). Mmm mexican food!

The funny thing is the studio feels strangely familiar. I think I actually had a dream about this place. Feels real comfortable. Like all the ghosts are our old friends, helping us rock out.

Love y'all!

Ruyter and co.