Fake Spring

…is what I call the trick weeks of late March in Min­neapo­lis, when the snow starts melt­ing and the sun makes more dra­mat­ic appear­ances and the tem­per­a­ture slinks out of the news. But, every year — at least since I moved here in 2008 — win­ter peeks in for one last hey, for­got my things, just want­ed to drop back to say bye to some friends,” and the entire town gets impa­tient for win­ter to just be done and go home for the year. But — DAMN! — does­n’t fake spring still feel great as any­thing ever has.

Most of my fall and win­ter was spent in record­ing stu­dios with decent cli­mate con­trol, so rather than feel­ing bummed about the cold I stayed busy mak­ing fun records with old friends, Chris Koza and Dylan Hicks; and new ones, Mary Bue and Ellis. Lots of the usu­al demo/​single ses­sions that nev­er seem to see the light of day, and more time than usu­al pro­gram­ming my com­put­er to coop­er­ate with me, musically.

The most inter­est­ing move for me this win­ter — lit­er­al­ly, as I hauled fur­ni­ture and record­ing gear at 11pm dur­ing the polar vor­tex — was into the old stu­dio space of my pal John Mun­son. It’s not quite a stu­dio (although we did cut Lucy Michelle’s Attack of the Heart here) but it’s been fun set­ting up a con­sis­tent area to record new music. I try to make a habit out of cre­at­ing some­thing tan­gi­ble with my learn­ing process — if you’re inter­est­ed in fol­low­ing along, check out the stream over at Bones & Wire.