Apple Baseball. Issue #11

Last week, the E.P. release became a little more real when I booked a mastering date with Mark Guenther at Seattle Disc Mastering. Mark did the 3rd LAYMANS TERMS record (the red album) and I remember being happy with the way it turned out and thought he was a cool guy. For those who don't know, mastering is the final step of the recording process and the definition (which is really long) can be found here. It will be nice to have the songs interpreted by fresh ears, and given that little bit of extra shine that mastering can provide. I asked Brian Meredith to do my artwork for the record after much internal debate as to which direction to go, mainly because of two schools of thought. The first school of thought states that you should never put your picture on your cover. You should go for the more arty interpretation that is vague enough to make the listener ponder why you chose such a deep piece (even if it's because you couldn't come up with anything else, but don't tell them that...).
The second school of thought says you should ALWAYS go with your picture on the cover, and in that way it's also like a full press kit and an advertisement for the entire package. A lot of times this is a good idea for up and coming bands or an artist's debut. That is unless your stage attire is sweatpants, but even then you are rocking your own vibe so good for you!

What did I decide to go with? Hmmmmmm...


I can laugh about it now (can I?), but last week I was going into panic mode as parts of my finished songs were LITERALLY BEING ERASED by my external hard drives that though they said were formatted for a Mac, really weren't. Imagine this if you will for a moment...You are working on your album for months, and then one day you open your song file and PARTS ARE GONE. WTF!?! You close the file, restart the computer, open the file up again and MORE PARTS ARE GONE (insert crying here). After an hour and a half on the phone with Apple, I think the situation is remedied (knock on plastic), but it left me with some re-recording and damage control to do. It was panic mode for sure, and I wish that hell on no one.

After being cooped up in my studio for the past few months, and without a vacation planned for this summer, my old friends Matt from COLLIDER, and Ex-LT bassist Matt Campbell decided to go camping up by Cle Elum at a place called Cooper Lake. It was pretty relaxing and fun despite the fact that there was a burn ban and fires weren't allowed. What is camping without a fire!?! After much debate and talk of "The Man", we decided that it wasn't worth the $500 fine we would win if we got caught. That, and the fact that I would mentally see Smokey The Bear shake his head at me in disgust for a long time.



The next day we set out for reliving some adolescent memories in the form of APPLE BASEBALL. This goes back to when we were 13 and decided that it would be a good idea to make use of all the apples going bad in Matt's mom's backyard. We were happy to find that Safeway had 10 lbs. for $10, and knew the universe blessed the Safeway club card for us that day. Yes, for those who need to know they were Gala apples...
There really is nothing like the satisfying joy that fruit meeting the end of a bat can bring to you, and decided that it definitely needed to become a yearly tradition, and that getting juice all over my camera did not. It could almost become a purifying Burning Man of sorts for those who can't make the trip to Nevada. Tickets go on sale today...