tick tock tick tock

With the imminent arrival of a baby in the Attwood household, you’d be forgiven for thinking that theres not very much getting done at the moment with regards to Blueneck. Strangely, it seems to be one of the more productive periods for quite some time….im even updating the blog which seems to have been left alone for so long that it has cobwebs all over it. First off… a quick congratulations to Ben (Paget) and Emma who got married a couple of weeks ago. … it was a fun day … Krispy Kreme donuts as the wedding cake was an interesting idea , which I thoroughly approved of. It was nice to see all the members of Blueneck (new and old) at the wedding…its pretty rare that we see eachother outside of a musical environment these days. So Epilogue was released last month. Theres been some really nice feedback about this record. I didn’t expect quite such a positive reaction from as many people… I wanted to do something a little different before immersing ourselves into another vocal album and ive always wanted to write a record inspired by some of my favourite movie soundtracks and composers. It was very much a self indulgent period (ie highly enjoyable!) – I think it also brought out a different side to Rich’s guitar writing aswell…he came up with some really nice ideas – which I think he’s elaborated with on the new album we’re about to start recording. I think that Epilogue is very much a closing chapter to our first three albums…. But I wouldn’t rule out releasing similar records like Epilogue again… it was too enjoyable an experience to not do something similar again. New album – so we’ve been approaching this completely differently to all of the other recordings we’ve done in the past. All of the songs have been demoed (albums have always been written as we record it as opposed to prior to recording) and now we’ve started working on guide tracks at home. The past few days ive been working on programming drum patterns and rhythms in preparation for the first recording session on 1st December – Ive been sending them over to Rich…who then sends back his feedback… which is usually something like ‘its not quite right…try something else’. For some reason i always picture Rich sat by a swimming pool in the sun drinking a Pina Colada whilst giving his feedback on my ideas... Seriously though, we’re giving a great deal of thought to every detail this time BEFORE we’ve even started actually recording…. Its time consuming… and quite often I find myself still up at 3am just tweaking one last thing before going to sleep (I guess with a baby on the way I’ll be used to being awake at 3am anyway?!) I started writing the songs for this album at the same time as starting recording for Epilogue… Theyre 2 very different records – and so it was good fun working on 2 completely different projects. Whilst Epilogue was very experimental and a lot of time was spent just trying out new ideas whilst in the studio, the new songs have been carefully thought about, demoed and discussed amongst the band and producer. Quite often ive found that inspiration has come to me whilst in the car…and so most of the vocals on the demo versions have been taken whilst im driving the car – theres the sound of indicators clicking whilst I make the next right turn into a ‘drive through’ or the windscreen wipers scraping as I experience yet more typiacal English weather.… rest assured there will be no clicking indicators or honking horns on the final version of the record. Well, probably not. We are initially concentrating on just 2 tracks as opposed to working on lots of different songs at the same time. With both tracks, we plan to make videos for early in 2013…we hope to release these to you all well before the release of the next album… as a preview (or maybe as a warning) for what is to come with regards to the next record. We have one more show this year…as some of you will know it will sadly be Oli’s final show with us. Its not a bad final show though, as we will be travelling to Paris to play along with Mono. After that, we have made the decision not to tour again until the next album is completed and ready to be released. We’ll miss touring…but I think its now time to fully concentrate on this record. Hopefully the record will be ready to be released at some point towards the end of next year… I guess we’ll know a little more once we have started recording properly. Few questions answered for you that we’ve been asked over the last couple of weeks: Our Tee shirts are indeed 100 per cent cotton. There is no tablature for the piano parts – I cant read or write music. Sorry! Yes, Rich really IS that tall. no…you cannot have all of the lyrics for Repetitions. And …there MIGHT be a Christmas cover this year… a lot depends on how much time we have…. But im totally open to suggestions as to which Christmas song to cover… ??? I think im done…ive written enough to last another year I think….as always, thanks for your ongoing support Cheers Duncan x