01. NEW HOME LIFE

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To me, this song is everything that I wanted this album to be. It's the most meaningful song that we've ever written for many reasons, and I think it's an ideal way to start the album. I consider "New Home Life", "Our Holy Ghosts" and "The Constant" to be almost a trilogy, as they were all written at the same time, surrounding the same set of circumstances and emotions. They were the first songs that we wrote after we decided to add Dustin into the mix, and after we had decided that we were going to get started with the recording process. We knew that we didn't have a decent "opener" track, and I felt that we needed to start this album with something decidedly different than our past releases, so I set to work on this song. I distinctly remember being so happy upon writing it that I called Dustin and made him drive the half hour to my place where he and I sat outside, under the big oak tree in my yard and played through it. It remember him after hearing it the first time suggesting to use trumpet to outline that ending melody. I was like "can you even play trumpet?", to which he shrugged.

The first minute and a half of the song was recorded completely live with only a hand-held tape recorder. The decision to do this was definitely split between the people involved, but a few of us felt strongly about it and knew that it was how we wanted to start the album. We never even set up mics to record it properly... just the tape recorder. While in the studio, on that same cassette tape we discovered a conversation between Dustin and our good friend Kristy that he had recorded without her knowing during a train ride months prior. You can hear that conversation and the train making noises in the middle section underneath the guitar vamp.

I recorded the main guitar parts on this song with rusty old Squire Telecaster that I found in Dustin's basement. For some reason, it seemed appropriate and it actually sounded great. We recorded the big percussion hits in the massive foyer of the Exchange to get that ultra roomy sound and get those drums sounding like cannon fire. Our good friend Ben Grigg came in and played the trumpet melody at the end, which Dustin usually covers live. We were also fortunate enough to be able to record the piano parts on a beautiful Yamaha c7 Grand for this song and a few others. All in all, this is one of my favorite songs that we've written and I feel like the recording really came out perfect. All in all, it directly embodies the overall theme of "starting over" more so than any other song on this album.

As we recorded the album chronologically, this was the first song to be completed and the first mix that was attempted. The initial mix was actually fairly disappointing and a far cry from the final version, as Jeffro had a much different, more polished direction in mind. It ended up taking us almost a year for us to get back on track from that initial mix, but I can say that all of us are happy that we pushed each other to get the final sound that we did.



DEMO - Recorded by Marky; acoustic to GarageBand.