phonofield

There is something to be said about our process now… it’s crazy and maddening and yet I think it is incredibly effective. Not effective in the sense that we have cranked out songs, because we haven’t. But evidenced in the fact that we are playing stuff I believe other bands would consider gold… and then throwing it away. Absurd, you might say, why not just write gold? Because gold isn’t good enough. Speaking of treasure, scroll to the bottom for a gem.

I found myself obsessing for hours after our rehearsal about what would work best with this idea I came up with a month ago, and nothing would work. And it was all good stuff… stuff that might eventually become other songs, but none of them were the answer for THIS song. It always felt like patch work, or grafting a limb that didn’t belong.

This process is effective. We have all the tools. We have the talent, the creativity, and the commitment to the process, and the only thing left is time. “Patience,” we keep telling ourselves. And we have to believe in this process, or else we know that we would just re-form with a new member or additional members and write what we always wrote, continuing in the same, comfortable roles. As much as we want to get out there and play again, we have committed to incubate until we are once again become full-grown. It would be easy to do covers and old songs in a stripped-down band, but that would be altogether missing the point of this new challenge presented to us… to make the best music the three of us can possibly make. The most honest, fresh, inspiring, and deep stuff… or just the plain most beautiful. I guess you might say we are perfectionists. I don’t really think so… but we’re can’t be far off.

Part of this process means we have begun to experiment lots. As I hinted at before… we never intended to abandon drums/percussion, but we’ve had to come to drums as an instrument choice much more deliberately. The formula has definitely changed. There is no formula. Well sort of. We still like guitars, and we still like singing.

Here are some snippets of what our practices have looked like…

Until then, here’s a little snippet of what we’ve been up to: