We finished up the year with a very productive recording session on Tuesday night in Ashland, and then a great (but freezing!) show last evening up in Winchester. But at least we were inside for this one (some of you may remember a New Year’s Eve in Fredericksburg a few years ago where we were playing outside! Never again, I hope!). It was bitter cold, and one person said they heard that winds got near 60mph yesterday, so all in all we fared pretty well!

At the recording session, we started on some vocal parts, including lead and backgrounds for “Wolfman”, which is coming along nicely. Still several instrumental parts on some songs to go, and we’re just getting going with the vocals, but it’s really starting to take shape. Greg brought his banjo in on a song, so things continue to stay interesting (!)

Got a few days off to thaw this weekend, but then we’re back with shows next week, and more recording. Details on the shows are over at our site, and I’ll keep you posted on the recording progress here. Also I hope to be able to post some stuff soon, including a few clips from some live shows. Maybe I’ll have to get Cole to show me how -- he’s now sort of “running” the Taters’ MySpace page, since I don’t have time to keep everything out there updated!

Ok, off to start a new year…

Another unexpected and much appreciated gift towards the new CD, this one from “Anonymous Fan” came in the mail today! Don’t even know who to thank for this one, but I hope whoever it is reads this blog so I can say how much all the Taters appreciate it! It’s no exaggeration to say that this will really help us keep things moving, especially as we enter into the bleak midwinter (or, as I like call it… January!). The gift came with a great poem as well, and I’ll post that as soon as I can type it all out (or persuade other family members to help

I’m always happy when people come up at the shows and say how much they enjoyed it, or when I hear from people who’ve enjoyed the CDs. It means much more than a lot of people probably realize. When you consider how much music is out there in the world, how many shows there are to see on any given night, and all the competition from TV, radio, etc, it’s pretty encouraging to know how many people are actually choosing to spend their time with us. I don’t often take the time to thank everyone individually, especially those who come out regularly, or who buy all of our music, but just know that it’s all absorbed and appreciated. I’m sure the other Taters would echo me on this!

So, “Anonymous”, thanks again for your gift, and I hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of it when the CD comes out!

I think you will!

And I’ll leave you with a quote from the good Dr. himself,

"Welcome Christmas, Bring your cheer
Cheer to all Whos far and near
Christmas Day is in our grasp
So long as we have hands to clasp
Christmas Day will always be
Just as long as we have we"

or rather, one fine evening was had on Saturday, at the 5th (6th? 8th?) annual TaterSons Christmas Party show in Ashland. We’ve been doing these shows for sometime now with our Tater pals from up the road apiece, the Grandsons, and it gets more fun each year. At several points in the evening there were 4 or 5 Taters, 4 Grandsons, and I could swear I saw at least a few ladies dancing, and a lord or two a’ leaping on stage (or maybe that was just Harry. It gives us a chance at least once a year to pull out the stops on most of the Christmas songs we know, and a few that we don’t -- would you expect any less from a Taters show? Some of the best parts are trying new arrangements on the fly and having them work!

Here’s an example -- Greg was riffing around on guitar with “I Can’t Turn You Loose” as we were about to start a song, and Chris (from the Grandsons) picked up on it, so Silver Bells turned into a most unique rendition! Take a listen -- Silver Bells

We hope to be having some of the Grandsons on the new CD, doing some horn parts, and after this show I’m especially excited about the prospect. As a lot of you know, there were on several cuts on our live CD Just One Night, and that was a blast as well.

Thanks to all who came out and making it a fine, fine evening. I’ll leave you with this for now (no, we didn’t actually do this song, but in the future…?)

One of these days we’ll finish a Christmas album (maybe after we finish the current album… focus… focus…), but for now we do have 2 songs up for sale on a Taters MP3 page, as well as several free downloads. Still testing out a few ways to handle the free downloads, including Box.net, so let us know what you think.

In the meantime, you can also listen to the song for free on MySpace  – go to http://www.myspace.com/tatermusic add “My First Christmas” to your MySpace playlists as well!

Just a quick posting to say thanks to Ruth for the very nice gift she sent. It will certainly help with getting the work done on the CD, and it’s much appreciated! I’m really grateful to know people are interested enough in what we’re doing to help support it like this. Came as a total surprise, and that made it all the more… Christmassy!

For those of you who don’t know Ruth, she is a music lover who hosts a great series of house concerts in VA. We played one of her House About Tonight shows this past Fall and had a blast with it.

As Clarence said, “Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.”

Some great stuff from everyone last night in the studio sessions. Brad put down a bass track on “Cat in the Window”, and Tater Pal Flyin’ Brian Sulser stopped by and played stand-up bass (being the stand-up kinda guy he is) on “That’s Me”, a re-working of a tune from our Recess CD a few years back. Mr Marrs proceeded to amaze and astound the masses on both nylon string and electric parts, adding, as always, new directions to the songs that I hadn’t even known existed! I think you’ll be really happy with the results. Hope to post something here soon, in some state of incompletion.

Tonight is our last Shenanigans show for the year, so if you’re free come on out and join us! If not, you can sit home and just watch this instead:

It all comes down to the low end: I’ve had two shows this weekend, neither of them with The Taters. For both I played bass, which used to be my full-time axe-tivity with The BopCats. So, the chops are sharpened a bit – and just in time. I think I’m doin’ my first recorded Tater bass track tomorrow night…..AND…..we will also bring in our first official guest Tater for the sessions, our friend Flyin’ Brian Sulser, who will provide some bull fiddle on a cut. Ya Hey!

……having a real guitarist in this band. Strumming the Larriveé is easy, and it’s even easier listening to Greg nail bit after bit. The layering has begun, and this thing is gonna be sweet.

Cant wait to start the vocal tracks…..WAY too much fun……

and I’m pretty sure I heard at least one hoo-whunker before the night was through (oh wait, sorry, that one was me)! I’m very happy with how the rhythm tracks came out from yesterday. We got some great sounding stuff and made a bit more headway through the basic tracking. We’re only 2 sessions into the album, and we’ve already managed to get down most of the drums, some acoustic and electric guitars, and a leather cushion off of a chair in my house. There are so many more things around that will make noise, so I don’t really know what we will end up with, but, as any other Tater will tell you, I love the whole process of recording! So many chances to try things that we can’t really do live, like having 2 Brads, or 3.5 Gregs, fr’instance, and the discovery of sounds and ideas is so much fun! It feels like painting does, in that we get to see the finished work revealed to us a little at a time. In performance, we never have that luxury; we might wish we had played something differently, or I might like something we just played, but basically by the time we discover that, it’s over. If we’re lucky we can try to repeat (or not!) the same thing next show, but it’s never the same.

In the end, it reinforces the idea that recording, at least in the studio, and performance are two very different things, with very different results. There are benefits and pitfalls to both, and I guess the trick is let each one be its own thing – use a live performance to do what you can’t in a studio setting, like interact with an audience, and feed off of the energy back & forth, and use the studio to capture ideas and possibilities that are either impossible or unlikely to come from a live concert. For myself,  I’m not really that interested in hearing an artist in concert duplicate their album note for note, solos & all, and hearing an album that is just a ’snapshot” of a live concert isn’t much better. Without being there, as part of the audience or on stage, the “live” aspect of it just feels lost on an album. There are exceptions to both, but in general I’m much more interested in letting each medium do what it does best.

So don’t expect to see the leather cushion at a show anytime soon, but I think you’ll like what it can do in the studio!

Listening to the tracks we did last night – already hearing all the rest of the layers in my head! Sure is nice to be creating for posterity again…….