The Knockdown Ain't It Time She Loves To Fly I Thought Strange Strange Torn Shirt Downline Raising The Serpent Submarine Cortege A year or two ago I put a new band together and started rehearsing in a new space. Every once in a while we would record the rehearsals using one or two microphones and the tapes always came out great. I decided that I would build my own little studio and record the album in the rehearsal space that sounded good anyway. So that is exactly what I did. I bought two 20 bit Adats and a little board and I engineered my own record. It was a very big learning curve, but I had a bunch of outboard gear already. And I've been in enough world-class studios and worked with enough great engineers and producers to have a leg up. I also had my mastering engineer stop over a number of times and read me the riot act. He would talk about standing waves and frequencies and all the things I had to improve and I would go home and climb into bed for a couple weeks. Then I would crawl back over and buying more equipment I would get back to work. For this reason the record took quite a while to make. We did the basics over about a three-week period, and I layered guitars and vocals on over the next couple months. When it came time to name the record I had a bunch of ideas for the cover, but one day I was sitting around thinking about the ideas for the cover when it hit me that the cover didn't matter. I wrote down "the cover doesn't matter" as one of the ideas for a title and it stuck. It means more to me then the surface meaning, having more to do with what we do in life as being sometimes independent from our essential nature deep inside. So here's this record, 10 new songs of mine. I'm quite happy with it. I have a lot of fun making it. I hope it sells, but I don't count on it too much. I'm very interested in performing the material live in front of people, so we will see how it does.