Now just some guitar leads to finish, as well as some guest musicians’ parts, and we’ll be all set mix, master, package, and deliver our new product to you, the satisfied customer.

Maybe we’ll post some more studio shots. Or maybe we’ll post some shots of Joey trying to play with the neighborhood cats. You just never know.

At this point, a week after the fact, we honestly don’t remember which came first: the dark & stormies or Pat wrapping a purple guitar strap around his dome and striking the Warlock of Rawk pose with Matty Campbell’s 5-string [at left and below]. We don’t remember which afternoon it was that Sam dozed off in mid-playback, was mooned on camera for his troubles and then furiously rose up to tear off a blistering solo in a fit of misplaced vengeance. We’re fairly certain it was Sunday afternoon when we invented the Loggins & Messina guitar effect pedal—for when you need more Loggins and less Messina [also pictured below], but we’re considerably less certain about when we were regaled with the tale of how Jeremy came to have an autographed press photo of Dog, the Bounty Hunter on his desk.

What we can tell you is that it was a weekend-long exercise in ludicrous that left us all a little surprised at how much we’d actually managed to get done. Well, maybe not Jeremy, but the rest of us were kind of proud of ourselves. Pics from Sam’s camera ensue…

Here’s the issue in a nutshell: there has been some talk of not pressing CDs when we finish the second album. Last time around, when we released Make it Worse, we had a number of discs produced and have been steadily selling them at shows and online. We  have also been selling some copies on iTunes and have made per-song downloads available through MySpace and Facebook. So we’re wondering as a music consumer, are you more apt to download an album from iTunes, or are you “keeping it real” by buying the disc through outlets like Amazon or CDBaby? As a concert-goer, are you comfortable picking up a digital download card that entitles you to a download or would you prefer to walk out with the disc?

Corollary: Are any of you interested in vinyl? We’re wondering if there’s any merit in considering a 7″ or even a limited edition LP, but we’re not sure how many folks are on board with the resurgence in the popularity of the medium.

We’re anxious to get your feedback, so if this question hasn’t left you as confused (and handsome) as the guy in this picture,  fire away and leave us some comments.

Last weekend, we began Phase 2 of what—by Sunday afternoon—had come to be loosely known as Operation Radically Smooth. There’s some discussion of using the new codename [a group effort bastardization of the requisition to "brace for the smooth taste," which boldy appears on the labels of Hurricane 40s] as the eventual album title. Argument #1: it could make for a totally rad album cover. Argument #2: it’s probably cooler than Diaper Preserver Service [which came from some misoverheard conversation at the Redezvous] or Balls, Cheese & Butterbeans [which we're not even sure how to start explaining and even if we did, probably wouldn't].

Moving right along, as with the rest of the remaining sessions, these three took place at Jeremy’s MR.STUDIO space in the Lancaster Music Exchange building on East King Street. Starting Friday night through Saturday, we completed all the acoustic guitar tracks. Then, Sunday we moved on to tracking Sam and Pat’s electric guitar parts—get this: at the same time. Crazy, we know, but the fellas are getting all symbiotic with their harmonic jaunts and we think it’s going to go a long way toward putting some on stage energy into a studio recording. The dudes really worked with each other to get some very complimentary guitar tones and though we may be just a bit behind where we would really like to be, what we have so far is exactly what we were hoping for.

We did have some fortunate contact with the outside world in the form of some very welcome visitors. We practically had gourmet catering with the level of commitment to culinary excellence the ladies brought to the table—even if the table was a blue plastic bass drum case. On Saturday, Jeremy’s lovely wife, Jamie, brought us a crock full of some rippin’ chili, which featured little star pastas. We highly recommend you consider adding them to your own recipe for the outright zazzle factor it brings. That’s right. Zazzle factor. Sunday, Sam’s lady, Jen, brought some delectable French toast bread pudding and then a tray of veggie lasagna. If the girls are willing to go public with their secret recipes, maybe we can feature them here on the blog at some point soon. Official Slimfit Banjoist/Keytarist/Boombah-Stickist in Residence, Tim Stengel, stopped in for a visit Saturday evening. Sunday, Jeff Royer came by and offered a fantastic idea for using a horn section in a song which will go unspecified at this point. There’s also talk of some judicious use of piano and some pedal steel on a song or two, though we’re doing all we can to resist getting too far away from the live incarnations of our songs this time around. This could, as Joey so eloquently put it, lead us down the slippery slope to “tracking sitars for Standard of Life.”

What we didn’t have in terms of visitors last weekend were any talented photographer types, so we had to make due with our own cameras. These are from Sean’s camera. As it turns out, the Olympus Stylus 850SW is better at not breaking after a fall of less than six feet and not short-circuiting when dropped in a toilet than it is actually taking high-quality photographs, hence the fairly heavy use of Photoshop to make them look more “artsy and interesting” and less “like crap.”

Friday night, it’s back to electric guitars and then time to start some vocals, so if you run into any of the boys, we beg of you to kindly resist the overwhelming urge to karate chop them in the throat—just for the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and we want your honest opinion on something that came up Sunday afternoon, so do us a favor and check back in later this week to leave your comments regarding the next post.

Where were we? Sammiches. Right. So, after a representative from our cartel of insanely hot band wives (Alicia, in this case) brought us a lovin’ pic-a-nic basket full of lunching treats, we got back to down to the nitty gritty. Another friend with a fancy camera and a talent for the photographic arts, Lacie, came by and captured a little more of the late-Saturday-afternoon-and-into-the-evening magic that saw us plow through several more clumps of our drum and bass tracks—not to be confused with drum & bass tracks, which will surely be the basis of our third album, next year.

All photos in this post credited to Lacie Burk.

By the time we called it quits, shortly after 10:00 if memory serves, we’d gotten through all 13 songs, with only some bass cleanup to do the next morning. Or, so we thought.

With fresh ears Sunday morning, we discovered we’d recorded one song at a tempo a little too fast and another positively, entirely too fast. Back to the drawing board for The Path and Lost Along the Way, which initially felt like something of a disaster, considering we only had a few hours before load-in to the Chameleon for the show that night. The dudes had their A-game, though and we were able to re-cut them, clean up the bass tracks, lay down some fuzz bass and pack up.

With the catch phrases sham [an accidental portmanteau of "Sean" and "Sam"], it changes with the heat [borrowed from a series of encounters Jeremy had had with the landlord at his recording space, repurposed as a reminder for Joey to turn the thermostat down so the gentle humming of the furnace wouldn't appear in our recordings], still on standby [from Sean continually forgetting to switch Clint's Portoflex out of standby mode] and hey, Tony, this is Sean, our bass player [uttered the majority of the innumerable times he started clicking off a song for a take while Sean was still tuning] added to the lexicon and all but roughly 3/4″ of Sam’s bottle of Black Bush polished off, it was high time wrap the rhythm section sessions.

Up next, this weekend begins the guitar sessions… in about an hour, actually.

Friday evening, as revellers strolled downtown Lancaster’s streets taking in the sights and sounds of First Friday, on the other side of a brick wall and a couple of sets of heavy curtains, we were nearly oblivious to the outside world. By the time we got Jeremy’s mobile command station set up, figured out our ridiculously elaborate mic rigging for Tony’s drum kit, worked out which combination of bass equipment was going to get us where we wanted to be, wolfed down a couple of slices of pizza and put our headphones on to begin our first recording of the rhythm section, it was after 10:00. After a few cracks at Rome, we got our mojo up and laid down a take we wanted to keep and decided to call it a night—meaning go next door to Gusto and engage in some inane conversation about nucleation and that merits of laser-etched beer glasses.

Shortly after 11:00 Saturday morning, we settled in for the first takes of The Path. We quickly learned there was a lot more rhythmic subtlety in that song than we had realized and it took some experimentation to get it to work. Eventually, we did and then were able to roll on through the next several songs, into late afternoon and sammich time. Our friend Bianca took some time away from her backyard oasis project to come by and help document the process in pictures…

All photos credited to Bianca Cordova.

To be continued…

March is upon us, as is the winter of our discontent with winter—which has been exacerbated by the swirling mini-blizzard we had in the northeast this morning. However, this March is going to be different, as it will probably be the first time we’ll actually wish we had a little more time with it.

In four short days, the five of us will begin the first of four weekends of studio sessions to record our second full-length CD… for the first time [not counting the other first time five days ago, when we cut thirteen rough demos]. Luckily for you, that was not a word problem. If it was, the answer would be “eleventy.” Those demos—final versions of which may or may not appear on the final album—included, in no particular order:

• The Path
• Not Again
• Rome
• Lost Along the Way
• Nothin’ But Time
• Standard of Life
• More than Wrong
• Damp Powder
• Afraid to Fail
• Yesterday’s Gone
• Whisperin’ Wind
• You Don’t Know

We’ve enlisted the considerable talents of Jeremy Bentley (MR. STUDIO) for engineering & mixing while Mark Peteritas will again handle mastering of the final product. There are some last-minute deliberations going on about where we’re going to spend the first weekend, cutting the bass & drum tracks. It’s looking like we’ll either use our practice space or possibly rent Mike Musser’s space in the Keppel Building, in the hopes of getting some big, fat, natural reverb. Either way, a couple of photographer friends of ours will be dropping in to visit at various points, so check back into the blog soon for some candids of the gang hard at work. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’m going to spend most of this week just trying to contain my anticipation.

As soon as we wrap up Sunday afternoon, we’ll take our instruments, blistered hands, leftover moxie, but not our leftover Piel’s on over to the Chameleon Club for a WXPN-sponsored event. Lancaster native Madi Diaz will open things up as she rolls through her hometown on national tour. We’ll take the stage second and the always amazing Perkasie will be headlining the show. Doors are at 7:00, so we won’t keep you up past your bedtime on a school night …much. Advance tickets are a couple of bucks cheaper than getting them at the door, so if’n you’re interested, you can snag ‘em at Dosie Dough (Lancaster and Lititz locations) or Senorita Burrita and online through Ticketmaster. If you’re the sort of person who regularly runs into us at either work or Hildy’s, or if you work at Hildy’s or sometimes catch us at Hildy‘s on the way from Brendee’s, you can email us (band@slimfitband.com) and we’ll arrange to personally sell you one at the moment of greatest mutual convenience (probably at Hildy’s).

We somehow convinced Gregg, the Chameleon’s manager, to violate everything he believes in by booking this show on a Sunday evening, so if you can’t do it for us, do it for him and his staff, who just endured hours of screaming teenagers at last weekend’s David Archuleta show, presumably for about a buck-two-ninety-eight in tips from the one person that bought a Miller Lite in the Lizard Parent Lounge during that concert.

Oh, speaking of which…
[2/28/09: Joey, Pat and Sean pull up in Joey's 1989 Ford F-150 to unload gear for the post-American Idol runner-up show they'll be playing later that night with The Dan Kauffman Band and They Were Only Satellites. The threesome struggle to keep old shoes, disintegrating cardboard boxes full of unknown detritus and crumpled cans from spilling over the tailgate as they unload equipment mere feet away from the end of the growing line of fans waiting for the doors to open. Two well-dressed middle aged women approach.]

Woman #1: Oh my God! Are you David’s band?
Pat: …why yes. Yes, we are David Archuleta’s band.
[Woman #2 produces a large department store bag crammed full of gift-wrapped boxes]
Woman #2: Oh, we are such big fans! We drove all the way down from Toronto. Do you think you could give these to him for us?

This past Sunday marked the inaugural match in what promises to be the most influential band basketball series in the storied history of the Lancaster Underground Music Scene’s 2-on-2 Basketball Tradition. Remember when Live’s Ed K. and Chad what’s-his-bucket got demolished by Jay S. and his sister from Suddenly, Tammy! ? Bigger than that.

Stay tuned for more updates on the progress of Team Slimfit’s Athletic Sword as it gets jabbed further and further into the shriveled-up heart of Wetlands.

Also- get all pumped up about our upcoming evening of entertainment with our friends The Dan Kauffman Band (Philly) and local chums (and future losers on the Wheel Of Death, er, basketball court) They Were Only Satellites.

Our conversation with Andi abruptly veered from talk of music to things of a more topical nature, such as sloths and beating people up. It was a fantastic, invigorating conversation, although in hindsight, we wish we’d devoted some talk to the deliciousness of condiments. By the time we’d finished with Andi, we thought we hadn’t said much of any value, but she assured us she was prepped and primed to fire off an entertaining and well-trafficed blog post about us. Which she wound up doing this morning.

For reasons that aren’t quite clear to us, Andi seems to really like us, both as a band and, we assume, as human beings. Which just feels great. And as we wrote to her in an email earlier today, her blog post captures the je ne sais qoi of Slimfit more accurately than any other piece of writing about us out there. Even though we don’t really know what je ne sais quoi means. (We learned early on that acting French makes us instantly imperial and unaffected.)

You can read about our conversation—and other thought-provoking happenings in Andi’s world—here: www.andilit.com/?p=357.

As an addendum, Andi chided us for not making more use of our blog space here. (We’ve managed an unimpressive three posts in three months; this one makes four.) So, we’re working on that. On may levels, Slimfit was designed to be viral from the get-go.

New home page

First off, we’re really quite pleased to announce that, at long last, www.slimfitband.com has been released into the wilds of the interwebs. Stop in to listen to some tunes, check out some pictures and/or watch a video on the media page; check out our upcoming schedule on the dates page; take in Jeff Royer’s Slimfit biography on the about page; join us in cursing that werewolf on our merchandise page; sign up for our email newsletter or just generally get your peruse on. There’s something for everyone who finds something there on the official Slimfit the band website the website. We may have even gotten the RSS thing right, but that remains to be seen.

[plug: if you like what you see there and are looking for a web designer, contact sean@landsharktechnologies.com]

We’ve booked studio time in March with Jeremy Bentley over at MR. STUDIO. More on that as it develops, but we are currently at liberty to tell you that at this point, we’re considering possibly recording 12 or so new songs and that the working title may or may not be “Yes, Slimfit About Me Like a Glove.”

Other news we’re also really excited about: it seems we’ll be getting to know the folks from Perkasie pretty well, considering we’ll be taking the stage together three times in the next month: this coming Tuesday, December 23rd on the main stage of the Chameleon (opening for Hoots & Hellmouth), at the Khyber in Philadelphia on January 9th (opening for Toy Soldiers) and in the Abbey Bar at Appalachian Brewing Co. on the 16th of January.

Finally, with 2008 drawing to a close, it’s time to revisit our vision for the future in the form of a mission statement [2008 Slimfit Mission Statement: A dedication to excellence, and a commitment to dedication]. If we can get the comments thingy working here on the the old slimblog and you submit an idea that we adopt or bastardize and then adopt, we promise you oodles of fabulous prizes and some possibly uncomfortable affection, but no credit whatsoever–just so we’re clear on that.