Okay, there's a fire.

"Okay, there's a fire". You would think given those words we would have immediately starting running in circles, waving our hands wild and free, desperately searching for some form of liquid to put out this new friend of ours (Atleast that's how I imagined myself to react in the face of a fire). Instead we stood as still as Man vs. Bear, like the fire would leave us alone if we didn't move. "Okay, okay.." Jon says, "What do we do?". Man, where do I even begin in a situation like this? There was no crumbling ceiling, no cat(s) to save, no John Travolta, and no trampoline at the bottom of this basement window, so all I've ever learned from the movies was of no use to me now. "Uh, should we just throw it in the snow or something!?". I know, I know, you can't just pick up a fire and throw it away, but what happened was a ceiling light fell and set the outer shell surrounding it on fire. Jon triumphantly took hold of the little demon and I opened the door behind me as we danced our way into the cold and watched it wither away.

I really made that entirely more dramatic then it actually was, but it made for an interesting first day in the studio. Aside from all that, it was a very successful day in the sense of getting to know both Jon Alvin as my producer and Chris Faller as a musician. I have known Chris for a while now, but never really knew the extent of his abilities until that day. He took the skeleton of my song, "Peace Not War" and built this brilliant, subtle layer of intensity in the rhythm section that still gives me chills when I hear it. Jon was able to look at "Peace Not War" for what it wasn't. He recognized it's potential and challenged me to take it to a place I never would have dared to go. See, these songs are my babies. Finding the right producer is like trying to find the right babysitter for your children. I trust now that both Chris and Jon will feed these songs, play a few rounds of Nintendo Wii with them, get them to bed at a reasonable hour, tuck them in, and leave one light on in the hallway.