PRACTICE

Practice Room Floor1. look closely and you can spot the key ingredients to a traditional rock band practice space: tipped over can of olympia beer, toilet paper (for earplugs), guitar player magazine (with tablature to def leppard's photograph inside!), and about 5 square feet of space for us to fit into.

Sarah worried?2. "oh no! we only have 3 days left until we start recording and we still have to write 5 songs!" self-explanatory3. our favorite graffiti, located in the hallway at the practice space.
That's Kyle4. kyle is looking sultry for the camera. this picture makes his left arm look gigantic! it is really much more sleek. kyle, where is your trademark headband? Practice Room White Board5. these are the working titles we had for the songs before we wrote lyrics. they are completely different (thank god) on the album.

BASIC TRACKS

this is what we do for a couple days. play each song over and over untill we get it right. a few of the songs were so new that kyle was still writing his parts as we were recording them! the last picture is our engineer, scott, helping me figure out a good guitar sound-- it was great recording with him because he plays guitar as well and has infinite patience when it comes to trying out different combinations of amps and pedals, getting just the right sound for the song.

Basic Tracks - Maggie me three! - Sarah

VOCALS, CLAPPING, ETC.

The Conversation1. here we are working on the conversation that happens in the song "telephone game"... scott hooked up an old microphone to an overdriven old gibson amp to create a phone-like sound.

 Sarah doing vocals2. "oh shit! can i try that again?" (and again and again and again...) Sarah & Maggie doing backup vocals3. maggie and i doing our shouts and backup vocals.
Maggie getting ready to sing4. maggie is hitting the sauce. "little bottle of confidence" we like to call it. we went through a lot of old crow during the recording of vocals, it helps to numb the vocal chords and stop my voice from cracking. Hand Claps - there were lots5. there are a lot of hand claps on this record-- i left it up to maggie and kyle as they are the rhythm section, it got very complex during "southern girls"!

NEXT PAGE: John Golden mastering the record

this page: text sarah utter/photos sasa foster