Neon City was recorded between April and May of 2011 at the North Midtown Arts Center in Jackson Mississippi. We originally rented out a room as a place to rehearse and leave our gear set up as we prepared for upcoming gigs. Adjacent to our studio was a large room with hard wood floors normally used as a performance space. It didn’t take long for us to decide that we should start recording in the space and utilize the amazing natural room sounds available to us.
One day our bass player, Matthew Magee (Wooden Finger, Questions in Dialect) brought over most of his recording equipment and a laptop and it began. Not really sure of what kind of record we were making or in some cases what we were doing we just kept going. We picked songs at random from a list of 19. We ended up scraping most of the early stuff we recorded as we learned and experimented. We recorded nearly every track by running mic cables and microphones out into the large room. Most of the reverb on the record is the natural sound of that room.
The time of making this record was coinciding with me packing up and moving from Mississippi back to Oregon. We were forced to move quickly in the recording process. Most of Jason Daniel’s guitar parts were recorded in a few takes. We tracked over half of the drums in a 6-hour session in one day with Dave Hutchison. I spent every free minute I had in the studio working. It was and amazing time of creativity, frustration, and fatigue.
Half of the songs on the record were written over my last 2 years in Mississippi while playing, rehearsing, and touring with the band. The other half were written in those last months while we recorded.
We recorded right up until my last week in Jackson but the record wasn’t yet done.
I set up a make shift studio in a spare bedroom at my childhood home in Boise Idaho and spent June of 2011 working on the record. I had been given a Fender Rhodes piano the previous summer and stored it in Boise. I was excited to include its sounds in the record.
In early July I returned to Mississippi and we spent 3 days mixing with Winn McElroy at his Blackwing Studio in Water Valley. Winn took our mixes and made them what you hear on Neon City. Timothy Stollenwerk in Portland Oregon did the mastering during the winter of 2011.
Nearly a year after we began the record it will be released on April 24th 2012. It’s impossible for me to be an objective listener to Neon City any more but I am proud of our efforts and look forward to sharing it with you.
Thanks for supporting our music,
Johnny Bertram
1/12/2012 (Oregon)
