I was still scrambling out songs Sunday morning, right before I drove down to Connecticut for gallivanting with good friends and, of course, the big recording session. This being my first foray into the mysterious world of recording, I was a trifle nervous. Fortunately, I was in good hands. My friend Craig is incredibly quick with the technology, and has a great ear and a laid-back attitude. We got started at 9 in the morning (not an hour that normally finds me wailing with great vocal quality) and did between one and three takes of each song.

As Craig said "There's pre-Beatles recording, and there's post-Beatles recording." Pre-Beatles: you walk into the studio (record-company owned), stand in front of the mike, play live, get one take, and that's your product. Post-Beatles, your label budgets outrageous amounts of studio time for you to sit there with your producer and get artsy. The constraints of this project really lent themselves to the former method.

Before sitting down to record, I had always had a really hard time imagining how songs are fleshed out from the bare-bones lyrics and melody to full instrumentation. It seemed as though you'd have to be a musical genius to plan out a full-band rendition of anything and make it happen. But I had an epiphany as part of this RPM thing: after recording all the tracks straight live, we took a nice long break and went to play at the old-time session. Returning in the wee hours of the morning, we listened to the CD again, and something clicked. Suddenly I was full of ideas -- could hear what instruments would go where, could hear new harmony lines and accents and fills. IT would be really exciting to further develop any of these songs - and it taught me the power of listening back. I learned that recorded tracks can be built and that often they themselves will tell you what to do with them

It was also a meditation on the act of recording. A finished recording is really an illusion; it's like a piece of processed photography, as different from the real experience of making music live as a fussed-over, high-end restaurant meal is different from slow-cooked backyard barbecue. Or, in Craig's analogy, music is different from recording as conversation is different from literature. It's about creating a product, and when you hear the work of commercial recording artists -- what a lot of us unfortunately think of as 'music' -- we often forget that many laborious hours were put into to each element of the product, allowing them to achieve the level of perfection that seems so effortless.

So anyway -- it was a kick. I kind of feel I've got the bug, and want to do more music. RPM is the best thing that could have happened at this juncture. So many thanks to the Wire staff and the RPM volunteers, who all worked so hard at this; to Craig, for so much generous help (and for titling the record); and to all my friends for indulging we as I rambled on endlessly about RPM.

It's funny; I spent so much time concentrating on just making it to the end of the RPM process that I never really considered that it could just be the beginning. Now we're all fired up about the potential on the Seacoast for an even more connected and active music scene. It's only going to get better from here.

My next (last?) post will contain all the album's lyrics - I was inspired by reading Laurel Brauns'.