TuesdayNiteBlues.com

In recent weeks, bass man Drew J Howard let us know that it was time that he moved on to other projects.  We recognize that this was not an easy decision for him to make, but we have all experienced our share of conflicting musical interests over the years and agree that it is important to follow your heart, wherever it may lead...

As a holiday promotion, I decided to offer copies of the CD for $10, free shipping to anywhere in the US.  In case anyone's curious, there's very little profit in that deal... I just wanted to give our fans a chance to share our music with their friends and family at a really good price.  It's been a great year for the band, and I would love to get the album into the hands of as many people as possible before it's over.  And it's not too late!

This is amazingly hard to believe... it has been an entire year since we first entered the studio.  And what a year!  I remember it like it was yesterday... following six months of grueling rehearsals, Brendon, Bonnie, Jason, and I descended on the Brickhouse Studios in Wichita with a will!  I had a two-day session scheduled, and we were soon joined by Drew and Dave as we spun out the foundation tracks for what would turn out to be a little more than half the album...

It's been a long time comin', my friends...  If you've followed us since the beginning - or if you've ever done something like this yourself - you might have some idea how we feel.  We aren't professionals, folks... at least, not in the conventional sense.  The closest any of us gets to makin' a living in the music world is rockin' the bar on a Saturday night... If we were, maybe this would be old hat by now.  Maybe it'd be just another day...  But it's not.  It's like wakin' up from a really good dream to see that the best parts were all real...

There seems to be an awful lot of details involved in producing and manufacturing a CD.  The most significant part of the project, of course, is the recording process.  After more than six months of rehearsals, we began recording last September.  It took several months of sporadic sessions - compromised by life events, personal schedules, lulls in financing, and my propensity to keep writing new material - but we finally wrapped it up last month.  Then there were a few weeks of mixing and mastering, and the recording was complete.  The master sits upon a shelf now just to my left...

The day is growing ever nearer when I'll be dropping this whole package in the mail and shipping it off to the manufacturer.  I have the master sittin' right in front of me... a tiny CD-sized package that represents a year in my life and that of some of my closest friends, months of picking and planning while we put the songs together for disc, and weeks and weeks of poring over every performance as we committed our songs to the 1's and 0's of digital permanence.  (I remember when that looked a lot more like ugly brown tape on big ass spool!)  And of course, thousands of dollars invested in the hopes of something we can be proud of...

With any luck, the master will be done by the end of next week.  I can't even begin to tell you how inspired I am by the mixes we've done thus far... every song shines on its own, and the album is coming together with a powerful will.  I've never had so fine an opportunity to shape the music in my head into something approaching its true potential.  I've worked with some decent producers over the years, but something about this particular combination of talent - my colleagues who leant their sounds to the mix and ideas to the compositions, my co-producer and engineer and his remarkable studio, and simply the rollercoaster ride of our lives during the months we've pursued this project - something about it has added a new luster to the songs I thought I knew....

Mixmaster Craig is hard at work mixing and mastering the CD, and so far it is sounding fantastic!  A lot of sweat and more than a few tears have gone into the making of this album, and I couldn't be prouder of the results I'm starting to see.  I owe a lot of people some serious accolades.  In a very real way, this album is far from typical.  For a blues album, there's a mountain of instrumentation involved, and you really have to focus on the details to give every part its due.  There's but one section left to record, and a very special guest will be swinging by to do so...

At long last, the recording process is essentially complete!  It's been just over a year since the CD project really took flight, when Jason and I made our first trip from Wichita to Dodge City to begin rehearsals on the material for the album.  We had no idea whether it was going to pan out... and little concept of steps that needed to be taken.  We'd never tried this before; we were compiling material for an album to record with a band that rarely got together to jam and had remarkably little experience playing as a group.  But we were determined to overcome the challenges of busy lives and geographic separation to take our original tunes into the studio and make something that would last forever...