For those of you who missed our recent social media campaign, we deemed the operation a success and have posted our Regional Variations bonus EP online for all the world to hear:
It’s basically demos & alternate mixes of songs from our Indifferent Cities EP.
The last song is our favorite. During the production of the album, we were emailing audio tracks & Pro Tools sessions back and forth, but Team Vietnam’s hard drive died before they could make reference mixes from the final recording session. This means that Team America was basically putting together a pile of puzzle pieces without any idea of what the finished puzzle was supposed to look like.
The only session that survived the crash intact was “Tay Ho”, though something awful happened to it along the way. Maybe it went mad from watching so many of its brothers die in the drive failure. In the weeks before we realized what had happened, Misha and I had some fairly tense discussions about quality control. He thought I was being racist; I thought he had finally lost his mind.
We eventually got it sorted, put it on the album as a secret track, and were soon playing “Tay Ho” to appreciative crowds across Vietnam. The rest, as they say, is history. But, generally speaking, this is why you don’t record an album over the internet.
In other news, our store’s back, just in time for the holidays. Probably the only place you can get five albums for $20 this side of Moscow.
. Gibbard and Tamborello had nothing on the 7000 miles currently separating Portland from Vietnam, so we want to make sure we take the time to do this one right.