Born Again and Again and Again

Sometimes it can take years to get a song right. Back 2005 we began messing around at rehearsal with a song I'd been working on. It had a relatively complicated riff and dan and I struggled with how we were going to come up with a second guitar part. After two or three attempts at different rehearsals that went nowhere, the song was abandoned. What usually happens is we start work on another song and if that one goes well it's completely normal for us to never work on that aborted idea ever again.

In this case I didn't forget the idea. A few months later I demo'd the song at home under the title "Bad Blood." In order to make the main guitar riff more unique I split it into two parts and hard panned them in the mix so that it would sound like two battling lines. Here's a listen:



I emailed the song to Dan, who liked the idea of the two intersecting parts, and began writing his own call and response guitar part.

In July of 2007 we went in to record our EP Good Feeling with producer Frank Lenz. Due to contributing factors like being devestatingly hungover from Dan's birthday the night before and a catastrophic computer crash, the sessions were scrapped. We tried again in the winter of 2007/08 to better results and the song was renamed "Born Again." However these sessions were marred by lackadaisical performances and production, mainly on my part. I wasn't happy with some of the tones, nor was I happy with my vocal takes. Nevertheless the EP was due and we didn't have the time or resources to re-record it, so the song came out on Good Feeling in June of 2008. Here's the second version:




When we went to begin recording our full length in October of 2008, I brought the idea up that maybe we should redo a couple of the songs from Good Feeling that we were never happy with, one of them being "Born Again." The stories from these marathon sessions that have lasted nearly a year will undoubtedly come to light in later posts, but for now I'd like to share the lastest version of "Born Again." It's the way we've always heard it, and we accomplished it by spending hours getting tones, recording much of the guitars live, Dan and I head to head in our sweaty studio, and with the magic touch of producer/mixer Sean Foye. Hope you enjoy! PS Turn it up! This shit ain't mastered yet.