Last week I began recording an EP for one of my best friends Ray Padilla (He goes by Ray Junior but I just feel too weird calling him that in a personal context!). Ray has played music with us since high school and is a great guitar player and all around awesome musician. He was in a band called Bull Mountain with Easton and I for a few years before The Dreamer and the Sleeper (search us if you must but just as a warning, we were pretty terrible!) and now he has started playing bass for D&S.
I've wanted to record his songs for a long time now but was always too involved with recording D&S. After I had recovered from the grueling Autumn in the Evening recording and mixing process, Ray and I decided it would be sweet to get some of his own tunes recorded. Although Ray, Easton and I's songs are, in my eyes, very different... we all have pretty much the same influences. Steven Jenkins (Third Eye Blind), Zach Smith and Rob Crow (Pinback), and Nate Ruess and Sam Means (The Format, Fun.) to name a few have really shaped the way that all three of us look at songs and the songwriting process. So well the songs and style of Ray's music may differ from ours, there are also many similarities. Add that to me doing the recording and mixing of his songs and I think our fans are really going to enjoy these recordings!
We started recording an EP and so far the songs are coming together beautifully! It's been really great working on his songs and hearing the songs I've heard him play for SO long really come to life. It's looking like it will be a 5 - 6 song EP that will be released on Icarus Kids Recordings most likely sometime this Winter.
I'd like to keep posting updates on this recording process because I truly think that if you are here because you enjoy our tunes you are going to love these as well! Add Ray on Myspace and follow him on Twitter!
I have some quick news from the D&S camp as well! We have a tentative plan to record a new song next weekend. It is a song that if you have seen us play lately you have most likely heard OR if you remember this video we posted way back when. It's a really fun song that sadly got pushed off of the Autumn in the Evening song list pretty early, only because the mood and feel of the song clashed so much with the rest of the album. We really have NO CLUE what will become of this recording whether it will end up on an EP, Album or just released as a single. But it'll be great to get back into recording and I can't wait to see how the song turns out!
That's about it for today!
