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***WELCOME TO THE STUDIO***
Darren is currently mixing his new album in London.
He kept an online journal of his experience writing and recording the new album and we're going to post them
here for you. The first one is Darren's first entry. We'll gradually post the rest up until the present day along with any new updates Darren sends us. Please note that the original entries were written before the site design changed and archived until we could present them in this new format. Although not dated, the journal entries began from January 2003 and eventually catch up to the present day. Any new or breaking news from the studio will be inserted as we receive them and will be dated with the current date so you are aware that they are 'live' entries and not archival. (I have put these on the next page - click here to read them)
Hope you enjoy.
***ONE***
I wrote my first song ever on my own today.
It began with this tiny piece of music I wrote on guitar a year ago. I was in Dublin and strumming these chords on a guitar one day singing about the way I was feeling...
“I’ve been down a lonely street tonight, and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Clouds cover up a Dublin sky, and I don’t know what’s left of me, I don’t know what’s right with me..”
And then a year went by. I took a road trip to L.A and right before I went to bed I came up with the rest of the chords and lyrics and the song just finished itself. It’s amazing the way that happens. Right from the beginning I knew what the song was about, I knew it was going to be heavy and that it was going to be the introduction to an album that would take me down some darker and not so happy places. I knew I had to go there.but I was stalling. I’d been avoiding dealing with my emotions and the subject matter for long enough. For as long as I could I had been putting off writing songs for my next album because I knew once I went into this headspace it would be a while before I could surface.
But I’m happy to say that it felt good to open up this old wound.
Felt good to get some hurt out and I’m ready to start telling a story.
***TWO***
Recording at home has a few down sides. Mostly technical. Because I wanted to keep the whole thing intimate I didn’t want to go into a huge studio with a huge producer. That’s all well and good but it did take us two days to work out that the reason my voice sounded so terrible this week was because I was singing into the wrong side of the mic. That was kinda frustrating and a blow to the ego but a relief that I hadn’t lost the ability to sing (the conclusion I immediately jumped to)
So yeah, I have found myself on more than a few occasions thinking ‘my how things have changed!’... and 'gawd I wish we had an engineer!'
But jokes aside I can’t imagine making this record any other way. The up side to doing most of this in a home studio (a bedroom really) are endless. More than anything I’ve had so much time to experiment and make this record in a bubble free of expectation. Right now I’m not trying to please anyone. Just myself. To be honest, most of this record started off as a side project. I thought I was making this really obscure, dark, and indulgent confessional record under a fake name. Then I realized I was making the right record for me and I didn’t want it to just slip out there and not be associated with the changes and evolution that I feel in my life. I’m going to do it in two halves. The first part will be here at ‘smuglab’.. the home studio I’ve put together in a house in Marin.. and part two will be in London with a few people I’ve been threatening to work with for years. It’s going to be terrifying but so satisfying. All of the co-producers I'm working with are radical. Even the mix engineer I've chosen is an obscure choice, but it feels so right to me. It may be a little bit of a departure for some people to swallow but I got to the point with music that I thought I almost couldn’t breathe anymore if I had to keep all of these feelings and musical ideas under my skin. I'm also so bored with 'pop' music. Whatever that means. Bored with myself. Bored with genre. I wanted to walk away from this project knowing I’ve pushed myself lyrically and musically. Wanted to walk away from the record making something that I'm proud of whether it's considered 'commercial' or not. These days, I think that real is the most important quality. So far so good.
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