The Power of Eternity

Day nine in the studio, with vocal overdubs and guitar parts almost complete. We just have to add Hammond organ on a couple of songs and it looks like the gentleman who is going to do this is called Dow Brain – truly. I’m really looking forward to meeting him since with a name like that….

After six days straight, I took Sunday off and we investigated Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is a really cool New England town on a river estuary, with lots of Revolutionary War history. There are beautiful flower gardens there, which reminded me of England. In fact they even have a genuine English pub there, run by a Brit! A jazz band playing on the green, completed the atmosphere and we strolled around until suddenly the heavens opened and everyone got soaked to the skin. We made it back to my studio ‘lodgings’ and cheered ourselves by firing up the barbie. Mein host, Fred, excelled himself with his grilling skills. The evening commenced with us watching the entire two series of Extras while consuming Leinenkugels and champagne (not at the same time).

The material has really come together well. From the earlier sessions in Finland with Miri and Kimmo engineering, right the way through to having Giles Christianson and James Zaner working on the overdubs. Muddy has also been doing some of these in parallel sessions up in Finland. We’ve been getting some pretty unusual guitar sounds and the vocal sessions have been really relaxed and creative. So far, I’ve got the hots for songs like ‘In Crisis’ and ‘The Power. ‘ The real sleeper of the bunch is ‘Happiness’ which has come to the front, having been something of a non starter. ‘Dancing with the Shadows’ is Muddy at his darkest. I believe he was inspired by a dream he had. Sometimes on the road, he’ll tell me of one of his dreams and boy, are they sinister. Must be inspiration from all that winter darkness, that is Finland.

There’s a real mellow track called ‘Your Indulgence’ which hopefully may please the ladies, much in the way that ‘Loose Change’ did on the last album. The album title will be ‘The Power of Eternity’ which has it’s own story – more later. It’ll be good to sit with the material during the month of August since we’ll be gigging, playing festivals in Europe and so on. This will give us fresh ears for the mixing process, which will take place at the end of the month and into the first week of September. This is actually cutting it really tight for the U.K. release date of October 4th. We really want it to tie in with the U.K. tour, obviously. By the way Talking Elephant will be the U.K. label while Sanctuary will handle the release for the rest of the world.

Oh yes, and good news for Americans.

A tour has finally been booked for November 24th. It’ll cover a lot of our favorite venues but this time out will feature mostly the East Coast and Midwest. ‘Fraid we’ll have to save the West for possibly March of 2008. In actuality we are now booking through till next summer with a January 2008 tour of Germany and Holland, virtually ready to be posted on the site. For French and Belgian fans, there some dates for you too, during the first week of February.

Adios.