Eli | Mike | Mary - click for individual bio

September 10, 2003

We Monolators are busily toiling away recording our album. I believe we’ve managed to capture reasonably acceptable instrumental versions of almost all of the songs that we normally play in our set, except I think “This Is Goodbye” and “Office Drone,” and we can probably knock those off this weekend. Then I’ll need to go in and record my singing parts, and whatever extra noises we might be able to squeeze onto those few precious remaining tracks, before taking a stab at mixing the thing. Actually, before that we need to figure out how our mixing board in fact works. It’s a nice, big, 1970’s-era mixer with lots of knobs and padded leatherette arm rests. It’s brown. Nice and heavy. I think Mary with her big drummer arms could lift it by herself, but me, I’m a pansy. Mike claims that members of his family are capable of carrying refrigerators on their backs, but he has yet to demonstrate this to me. Why is musical equipment so heavy? Especially bass guitar equipment? Should I switch to something lightweight (i.e. the ocarina) instead?

I’m babbling, but the thrust of my babbling is that a bunch of folks (or at least more than two) have asked us when our album will be ready and the answer is “soon, conceivably.” Had we three or four days set aside to do absolutely nothing but make recordings it would have been done llong ago, but we are all frantic as can be and are only able to get together for brief snippets of time every now and then, so the project’s getting stretched out a bit. And then there was the question of whether or not the songs that are already out on the “Hi-Fi Sound” EP should appear on the album, and we decided: no! It should be all new stuff! So now we need to make up the difference; two new songs are written and we’re practicing them now, and I have an idea I’m trying to work out for yet another. I’ve got a title (“Falling Asleep In Art School”) and a tune for it, but beyond that it needs some work. So anyway, you see that we’re hard at work and we hope to have the record ready for consumption by October. I will certainly update everyone if this changes.

We don’t have a title for the album quite as yet, but we have a cover photo: we found a picture of the back of my Dad’s head, circa 1960, and it’s perfect! I don’t think, though, that “The Back of My Dad’s Head, Circa 1960” is all that great of an album title, so we’ll probably have to think of something else.

Oh, before I forget: I saw a wonderful thing yesterday! Wonderful in the sense that I’m about to make fun of someone, which is admittedly on the nasty side but I just can’t pass it up this time. So: a girl came into the Library the other day and gave me her I.D. card. She said her first name to me, and it sounded something like “A-kwa-nee-tay,” and I didn’t really think anything of it. But then I saw her name come up on the computer screen, spelled “Aquanette.” Remove the last two letters and you have the name of a very fine hair-care product. I do not think this could possibly be a coincidence.

I must go; the library is suddenly busy, and I must examine my stack of paperwork slowly and deliberately. Last night my drawing teacher gave us some cryptic instructions: “you are little ants! Slow down! You are little ants!” I think this means we are supposed to draw as slowly as ants walk, but that’s still unclear to me.

Eli