Awesome news to share:  FT is very close to releasing a new set of songs!

Back during the prolific college years, FT recorded an album every Christmas break and every summer break.  The Christmas albums were always an extra challenge because we had such a short time to record.  The various ideas that we’d developed over the Fall were worked out and recorded quickly on our workhorse 4-track recorder.  When all the recording was done, the album was finished.  There was no post-production or mastering work to be done.  That made life easy.

Christmas 2010 was similar in some ways:  We had limited time together so we had to work quickly and efficiently to get everything done and we had to only record a small set of songs to ensure that we’d get everything done.  What’s different is that, with digital technology, there’s now some post-recording work to do.

Well, that basically is good news:  we have finished recording and are ready to do post production work now.  That’s always a relief; the hard work is over.  We had six songs slated to be recorded for a new album.  Three of them, we recorded in Chicago in the summer of 2009.  We didn’t do much in between the summer of 2009 and Christmas 2010, so we decided there was enough delay and set a goal to finish the remaining six songs over Christmas, the same way we did back during our college years.  And, one of them, “A Small Life” was scrapped and re-recorded, with much better results.  So, we recorded a total of four songs over four days.  But, we’re still going to do a bit of touch ups, post production, and mastering work, so look for the final work to be ready by mid January.  Exciting – this is the first album since Relic, released over five years ago!  Precious Time.

A dance version of “Outside My Window” was performed in China by DJ Davide Succi with special guest, longtime FT guitarist, Theron Welch, on the guitar.  The show took place in the city of Haikou, on the island province of Hainan, right on the beach! “Outside My Window” was picked because of it’s simple synth line and singable melody.  There are numerous versions of the dance version of the song floating around (look for those to be collected and made available on this site), but this live version of the song was arranged especially for the performance in Hainan, China.  Parts of this version of the song, which already contains a ton of new material for the guitar, were written and arranged on the day of the performance.

Read more background on the story here.

Enjoy the show:

Just for fun, we created a Frozen Taco (old school Frozen Taco, that is) theme for Firefox.  Actually, Firefox decided to use the delicate word “persona” instead of theme. Basically, a Firefox persona will replace the boring gray background of your browser with the graphics and design of your choice. They are easy to create and Firefox encourages anyone to create and submit a persona.  So we did.

Anyway, here it is for all you zillions of fans out there!

This summer Facebook added “Usernames” so you can have an easy-to-remember URL on Facebook.  Frozen Taco may be a little late, but you can now quickly get to the FT page on Facebook by simply going to http://www.facebook.com/frozentaco.  Not too shabby!

In other news, FT has been quiet lately.  There were some technical issues in China regarding recording guitar, but those are now wrapped up.  Time to find time to finish off some of this summer’s recordings.

Also, we’ve got a few posts ready to go that will be released slowly over the next few weeks.

Chicago, IL

Hi folks!  As usual, we spent some time working out some new song ideas.  We always make rough recordings of new songs as they progress.  But, one of the goals in getting together this time was to make real progress on some of the songs by making official recordings.  With that goal in mind, Theron brought his new guitar all the way from China, a custom made guitar made by David Webber out of British Columbia.  The result was great progress made on three songs:  “Don’t Let it End”, “Nothing to See”, and “A Small Life”.

We’re happy with the progress on each.  “Don’t Let it End” is interesting:  The lyrics were inspired by a Chicago visit before Matt lived there.  The musical idea was recorded by Theron at least ten, maybe fifteen, years ago and recently rediscovered by Matt.  “A Small Life” was the most solid and prepared of all the songs, a tune very much in the spirit of “Living in the Now” from Relic.  The surprise song, “Nothing to See”, deserves special mention.  We had a super rough idea about this song and, just for an exercise, decided to record the song even though it was immature.  The result was a pleasant surprise!  Reminds me of the old FT days where we’d record a song in an afternoon with very little direction.

All of these songs will be polished up in China with 12-string guitar and some light effects.  So, look for these new ones in late August.  Here are some pics from the recording session:

Hey, we finally added a little Facebook page just a few moments ago.  Actually, there’s not much there because the purpose of the Facebook page is to direct folks to this site so they can download and listen as much as they want.  No purpose in uploading all the files (200+) to Facebook again!