Well guys, after hearing my tales of our band’s first experience recording, I am so, so pleased to say that the hard work is done, and that we are releasing the resulting CD (Bright Northern Skies) and EP (One for a Lover) this Saturday the 21st!

The gig will be such fun–you should all come! Here is a link to the event page on facebook for the location, time, etc. We’re holding it in an art gallery called Autumn Space, and it’s also a kid-friendly space if you want to bring your whole family. Some friends of ours volunteered out of the blue to coordinate free appetizers, and my mouth is already watering just reading through the potential menu they sent over. It’s BYOB, so feel free to bring a bottle of red–and don’t forget to bring some cash to actually purchase our two recordings! We’re selling our CD for $15 and our EP for $5–essentially, 19 tracks of music for $20–that comes out to $1.05 per track if that makes you feel a little looser with your wallet. And to top it off, some other fabulous musician friends are joining us, and they are seriously talented people.

After going into detail about our studio sessions (you can catch up here, here, here and here), you may be wondering what happened after all that. Well, a lot of stuff happened, and it happened fast (hence the lack of blogging on the topic). To meet our deadline (we kind of wanted to have an actual CD to sell at our CD release party, heh heh), we entered into about a 2-week period of what I like to call massive crunch-attack time. Because the description ‘crunch time’ alone doesn’t seem to suffice. This was intense, extremely stressful, and (dare I say it) distinctly not fun. There were tears. There were nightmares. There were nights of restlessness. There were phone conversations galore, texts, chats, and emails flying back and forth and back and forth and back again.

My head is spinning just thinking about it.

In fact, I haven’t been this stressed about anything since moving to Chicago 3 years ago! Nothing went wrong to cause this stress–it was just the necessary big push to meet the deadline, the effort that Eric, Carrie and I had to put into communicating quickly about a million little decisions that we couldn’t be in the same room to make (Google chat saved our butts on a few occasions), the nit-picky back-and-forth of finalizing the mixes with our engineer Rick, getting the song order nailed down, the mastering with the fabulous (and fast) Alan Hackert, the graphic design with the talented Kimberly Applewhite, figuring out the right size for the actual order of CD’s, etc.

So how did I like making an album? In short: the studio part, I loved. The rest of it, I survived.

And I’m so glad it’s done.

(but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited about starting another some day!)

The only big step that remains is getting our stuff on itunes, and I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s available for purchase there.

Now onto the happier part!

I’m so excited about the recordings. When we first started the process, I wasn’t sure how it would go. I had a little fear in the back of my mind that after all our work, I wouldn’t feel proud of the results. Thankfully, that fear has been put to rest–I’m so proud of what we’ve done. I’ve seen these songs go from musical ditties we were toying with, to full-fledged songs that we performed together and perfected, and finally to actual recorded pieces. There are 13 tracks on our CD and 6 tracks on our EP, and each track has a creative story behind it that I know and love. Music to “The Watchman’s Back” (there’s a little sample on our website if you want to listen), for example, was the result of an awesome creative afternoon in my living room that I recall with so much fondness. I remember working out the melody with Eric and Carrie, getting excited about it, then fitting it all together so that we could perform it at our next gig. And now, what started as a small, floundering melody has grown up and filled out and gotten itself recorded for posterity! Sniff sniff.

And speaking of the ‘sniff sniff’ element, there’s also a bittersweet side to our upcoming gig that I’d be remiss to ignore: it’s also a farewell concert, because Thornfield is being put on pause. I’ve alluded to this in the past, but for those of you who haven’t heard the nitty gritty, Carrie and Eric are moving to North Carolina in a few weeks, where Eric will pursue his Masters in Composition at UNCG. We’re not breaking up the band–but the distance is going to make regular gigging a little impractical for the time being.

So anyway, come if you can! If not, stay tuned for the itunes release! Love you guys, and thanks again for following along on this crazy and wonderful journey!

All photographs by the talented Zane Davis.