…except one.  Just one rule.  You have to be inspired.  We’re not really sure what that looks like either.  But we’re discovering.

Two weeks ago we started our next album.  The day before we had thrown everything away.  All ideas, all rules, all timelines.  We wiped the slate clean and declared room to breathe.  We shared with each other our hopes for this season and in doing so realized that our collective desire was to make something meaningful.  To ourselves and hopefully to you the supportive listener.

So far we have begun work on just one new song in the studio.  You will not be expecting these sounds.

I keep telling the boys that this record is going to be the color blue.  Not physically.  Musically.  I can’t really tell you what that means.  But I think you’ll hear it one day.  And you will hear the color blue.

If you had been in the studio with us tonite you might have been confused.  Nobody was in charge.  Nobody told the team how they were going to work or what it would look like.  We started with Eric and I tracking some electrics.  Then Stratton, Nathan and myself began whiteboarding and brainstorming layouts for a new website.  Then Justin and Eric started from scratch on a song idea.  Then Nathan joined them on drums while Stratton and I really dug deep for inspiration on the website layout.  It probably looked like chaos.  But if you looked close enough you would have seen we were operating just on the edge of chaos.  Work – good work – was actually taking place.

In the end, the new song took more shape when Stratton and Nathan made Eric and I roll off our tone knobs to a far more warm sound.  The riff Justin was toying with turned into a jam which turned into a rough song structure when Eric picked up the bass and infused some of his own ideas.  And a website layout born out of countless whiteboards, true inspiration and conviction was discovered.

It’s only been two weeks, but thus far inspiration was the rule and it was the outcome.  We promise to keep filling you in on what that inspiration looks like each week.  You play a larger part in this than you may realize.

-Josh