Meanwhile...Back at the Ranch (The making of)

We are very much looking forward to releasing our new album "Meanwhile...Back at the Ranch" tomorrow night! Behind albums are many stories and circumstances as to how the songs got there and why they got there together. When I'm listening to a record I always imagine myself in the studio with the band and wonder what it would have been like to add hand claps to "We Will Rock You," or to see who was actually responsible for the cowbell on "Don't Fear the Reaper". While our budget was not as big as Queen's for "News of the World", and our cowbell may have been played by an actual cow, here's a little back story on how our project came to be.

The Summer schedule of 2014 was grueling. From May through September we played 125 shows, yet somehow managed to grab a two day stretch to record the bulk of "Meanwhile".

We wanted to approach this album differently as to represent our music the way it sounds in a live setting, so we drove all the gear up to Beaver Dam, WI and set up on the stage of the Beaver Dam Community Theater. This old theater, which was originally a church, had such a wonderful natural reverb. We set up specific distances apart from each other standing a certain way to allow our individual mics to capture the live nature of our instruments. It was fun, unforgiving, and honest. This wasn't a situation where one could simply "punch in" if mistakes were made, and songs had to be completed in their entirety. I always have a place in my heart for top level production and precision song crafting, but recording live is where you capture magic and energy. It's the old way, the original way, and we like that.

We spent two days recording the album before resuming our hectic summer schedule. We began recording vocal parts in the fall and were mixing the record in January of '15. We've been rehearsing many of these songs in the last few weeks out of a necessity to remember how to play them! We recorded them, forgot them, relearned them, and now hopefully we can use what little of our brains we have to retain these songs for tomorrow's release. See y'all down the line!