First Practice

With the completion and release of Whimsical in Reverse, the band as a whole feels ready to forge ahead with some new material. Kelly and I have four completely new songs ready to roll out (to be fair, only one is mine...), all of which fall under the theme of history--which will hopefully make it to our new record.

We noticed at the last show that we could go without practicing for the entire week of the show and still pull off a pretty smooth and energetic set, proving that all the Whimsical songs are on auto-pilot. So last night made the first official practice of what I'll call the "History Era," focusing on new material.

We started by warming up on the two songs we've already worked up for the history record, "Bring Out Your Dead" and "Eli Whitney." Kelly had a fresh set of four-track demos that we listened to and played two of the three of them. The first was "Whiskey Rebellion," a firecracker of a rock song with a harder and maybe even funkier edge than the Distractions have attempted. I have always felt that we as a band have done a good job of taking the songs and styles we've loved forever and incorporating them into our songs, and then weaving from style to style as we move from song to song. We transitioned from that hard rocker with Daniel's meanest solo to date to "The Great Stink," which is jangly pop that conjures Kelly's love of The Cure and all of our love for early R.E.M. Then we started working on "Bob Dole," which I wrote a few months ago. Kelly had several suggestions for that one to make it fit his singing style a little better. I feel that after playing "Whiskey Rebellion" and the energy it intrinsically produces, the other two were much more difficult to pull together. We agreed to follow this one up with another practice or two this week in order to keep up the momentum we're starting. The last song we worked on was "Know-It-All," which we've been rehearsing since the summer and have played once live. It regrettably won't fit on the history record at this point, but we still want it included in our sets. We just haven't quite learned how to really play that one yet.

I definitely won't blog on every practice we do, but I thought this inaugural practice of this "History Era" was a good place to introduce myself on this blog as we move forward toward the release of our full-length CD.