dear reader,

hopefully by now a bunch of you have gotten over your fear that “long coats, no energy” is an april fool’s day virus and downloaded it already. it’s not. it is awesome. i got to listen to it yesterday with a friend, and it felt so good to hear a new song, all polished up. that’s the feeling i was hoping to have doing this once-a-month single thing… recorded, mixed, mastered in two weeks = a warm fuzzy.

honestly, it would have been done even sooner on my end, but it took probably a solid 15 hours to get the bass end right in the mastering stage. part of this, of course, is because i’m an amateur (albeit a SHOCKINGLY talented one) with no love for post-production, but the large part of it consisted of agonizing a little over what the sound of this song says about good night, states and who we are. now stay with me here.

there is a now well-documented trend in the music industry of making records sound as loud as possible at the significant cost of dynamics, timbre and beauty. i say sound as loud as possible because of course it’s mostly psychoacoustics (not regular-type acoustics!) that engineers deal in these days; it turns out part of that ugly, back-room process for most artists who don’t have $100,000+ recording budgets is to really, really cut the bass frequencies. a bright mix with less roundness can more easily be made to sound incredibly loud.

but we can’t live with a recording like that. it’s not right, people. i’m as thrilled as the next guy with a great low-budget recording, but where are all the kick drums!? (they’re here, by the way.)

we, the people of good night, states, believe that we are endowed by our Creator with the BASS.

there will be no papery, cheesy-sounding shimmery pop mixes.

so when you’re running (do people still do that?) with your ipod shuffle and one of our songs comes on after something from “magic” (sorry, bruce, but that album sounds just awful–i still love you), and you wonder why it’s not quite so loud, you can think back to this post.

the answer is principles, folks. we believe in the bass.

“this is a new word to me, near-fields.”

dear reader (hello! i haven’t posted in over a month),

my mind is filled with many such quotations (generally deadpanned in a thoroughly french syntax) from my wife, certainly because i love her but also because they’re funny. (”are you going to read me nietzsche?”)

of course, this opener is related to the sudden infestation of monitoring equipment in our tiny apartment, which my aforementioned wife has accepted graciously and with humor. (”do you like the new speakers?” “yes, they’re bumblebee-ish.” it sounds like lines from a foreign language textbook. welcome to our home.)

i’ve been struggling to write this post for several days now, but actually i think this is probably the best moment. last wednesday night joe and i left late and arrived in pgh at 2 am to begin recording on thursday morning. st. david’s in the south hills lent us their unsuspecting and conveniently vacant rectory, and we transformed it thursday into a little studio. (watch the photos page for a nice series on this.) we managed to track one whole song while we were there, wrapping up on saturday with a little extra keyboard work by megan.

since i’ve been back, it’s been All About the Mixing. this is scary because a) i’ve never mixed anything totally by myself before and b) my inner recording workaholic is brutal. having survived two days of it so far, though, i can report that everything is great. the tracking, it turns out, was wonderful despite the sprint. drums are tight. vocals sound great. the song is really gaining a life of its own now that it’s fixed in a tangible medium (little shout-out to copyright law!), and that’s what you hope for as a recording artist: that certain intangible extra.

it’s actually so great here behind the ‘phones that i can’t wait to record the next one. you can call this a soft announcement: good night, states is going to be releasing several tracks this spring, and i couldn’t be more excited.

watch the news page for a real announcement about the release of this single, “long coats, no energy.”

love from rainy montvale,
steve

ps. does ANYONE know how to make quicktime my default music player? stupid apple.