I first met Lindsie at the Vaughan's Open Mike, accompanying her on some cover tunes and some originals. When she spaced the chords to some Travis song, I kept playing and she finished it over just the percussion. This made enough of an impression that she asked me to join her on an acoustic set shortly thereafter, which, after some miscommunication, led to an invitation to join her new band. The first stable lineup consisted of Kevin Holland on guitar, Mike Mitchel on bass, and Jayh Johnson on percussion and backing vocals. Jayh, in particular, added a certain amount of depth to the sound, as he's a fantastic singer in his own right, but ultimately he needed to focus on his own music and we parted ways. Larry Schroeder of Regal Standard then came in and added his guitar and vocals, along with a healthy dose of his more sophisticated approach to songwriting.

After Larry joined, the sound of the band got more focused on big, poppy hooks, and released a 5-song EP produced by Chuck Gladfelter and Robert Byrne with that newly-honed sound in mind. Apparently the recording was somewhat of a difficult, torturous process for everybody but me, as I finished my drum tracks in about four hours on a Sunday morning in April of 2003. It took everybody else until October.

I was initially expecting this to be a very acoustic pop singer-songwriter project, in the vein of Michelle Branch or Avril Levigne. Light playing, keeping it really simple, maybe trying to emulate Vinnie Colaiuta's tenure with Sting. But once we had assembled the whole band, things started going in a more substantial direction. We rocked a bit harder than you would expect, and I enjoyed that. I probably helped drive that more than I'd be willing to admit, by laying down a very Tool-esque groove on one of the first songs we started working on, but everyone seemed down with the change, so I didn't feel like I had hijacked the sound of the group or anything. And there was a wide variety of styles in this band, much more so than with, say, URT, which was pretty much hard and loud and not much else. I got to use some more dynamics, which works a bit differently in this kind of band.

The subsequent move to the big pop sound was equally interesting, because I'm a sucker for trying to play meaningful, slightly askew drum parts that support the whole song (even if some of that gets tweaked out in post-production). The bar had already been set for the rock quotient, and the result was somewhere along the lines of Liz Phair's much-debated 2003 release, but without all the baggage of her indie rock past.

I don't know what it is about recording that tends to kill bands that I'm in. At some point during the making of the EP, Lindsie's interest in the project faded relative to other interests. Despite the notion that the operation was more of a partnership than a benevolent dictatorship, the backing band didn't have any say in the matter, and that left the whole thing in a temporary limbo that very quickly became permanent. On the one hand, I can point to a damn fine bit of drumming on the record, but I'm getting to the point where those sorts of moral victories don't really count anymore. I knew there was a risk in investing time and money in the band, and while I'm disappointed with the outcome, I made my choice to pursue it with my eyes open.