We auditioned quite a few bass players and none even came even close to fitting in. One day I bumped into an old school friend. His girlfriend was the sister of a guy who used to play bass, and I wondered if he was still playing. Matt came to rehearsals and within the space of a few minutes slotted into the role beautifully. We were a band again.
Within a few weeks we were back playing gigs, but we needed to get a single out ASAP. We scrounged together around $1000 and went to a better studio to record 2 songs on a budget. We had about 8 hours in the studio with an engineer, and we thought we could put 2 tracks down without too much fuss. We were in a good studio with a good engineer, we knew the songs backwards and we didn’t want to make the same mistakes we did the last time. Well so we thought ...
It took quite a while to set up the drums and get the drum sound going. I did not like the sound initially but we kept going, but I wasn’t happy. Then little did I know that Adam had invited some fiddle players he’d met a few nights earlier at an Irish pub down to the studio to add some strings. I wasn’t happy with that either, I thought that these guys would slow down the recording, and they did. They played well but it didn’t suit the song, but I was out voted so it stayed in the mix. We quickly ran out of time and the mix-down was rushed. By day’s end we had again failed to put something really good down on tape, at best we had a good demo tape … again.
