Last night, the band got together for a second time to rehearse in the studio for the International Pop Overthrow scheduled for April 28th at 4:30 at Abbey Pub. We also put together some "unplugged" versions of our songs on for the Razor and Die radio show where we will be playing live on the air, scheduled for Thursday, April 26th at 11:15 AM.
We have been working in the studio for TheSongOfTheDay.com for so long, it's literally been a year since we all got together in one room to play music. Most of our music is made piecemeal in the studio over the course of months. So it was a challenge as we got together to generate a setlist for the show, because we wanted to play a bunch of the new songs that we released on the RPM Album "All In A Day's Work" and also songs that we had only played on The Song of the Day.
Now, the ironic thing about recording music is that if you wrote it and recorded it close together, you might have only played a melody just once. And when you sang it, you had a lyric sheet in front of you. We literally had to figure out our own songs. The horn players were fumbling to figure out the notes of parts that sounded so confident on the recording. Not to mention, some of the songs had band members doubling, tripling, or more on their own parts, and they could only play one part on one instrument at a time. We had to make "live" versions of our songs.
To our surprise, those songs came together just great, and for those who can come to the show, you'll get a chance to hear a lot of new music, with unique instrumentation and a live twist. We're finding that we can perform more of the Song of the Day songs live than we thought.
I think that the best part of both of the practices have been the times where we were working on the unplugged set. We had to take songs that have full drum parts, electric guitar, and a chorus of voices, and do it with just the four people who are going to the radio studio. We did those in the living room next to our studio, sitting on the floor until late at night last night. Not only are we happy with how they sound, we actually have more songs ready than we can even play in that short set, and may just hijack an open mic night at a cafe so that we can do more of these unplugged versions.
With these live performances looming, our studio recording and writing production is really dropping off. We have found through our history that recording and playing live are both different "gears" and we can't easily do both at once. When the show is over, we will have to dig in to the studio to catch up and write more songs. We have quite a few more to do in order to meet our goal of releasing one for every day of 2007.
