Rise Again, again.
Rise Again was released 10 years ago this week, which brings back a number of random thoughts about the album.
In typical 800 Octane fashion, Dave didn’t have lyrics to most of the songs when we walked in the studio door. I’m pretty sure Dave wrote Lost At Sea first, in one pass in about 5 minutes. Never Sleep Again went pretty quickly as well. The strong songs always seem to write themselves. Other songs like Roads Less Traveled had lyrics being scribbled while being performed. Go For Broke was tough because the music was written at the last practice before recording. Paging Mr. Bronson almost got cut, while we were certain Now Or Never would be the most popular song. Totally incorrect. We did multiple takes of the spaceship noise in Destination:Space, however the howl in Bloodline only took one. Most people don’t know this, but the feedback in the middle of Dead Air is morse code for S.O.S. Subtle, but I love it. We also spent more than two hours discussing whether or not we should include Waving Goodbye on the album. Although factually correct, the song is still totally ridiculous.
As for the physical album, that was a labor of love and hate as well. Like all three of the ‘R’ albums the artwork and layout was hammered out by our friends Kevin and Robert in Seattle. Navigating the design electronically between people with good taste (them) and people with poor taste (us) took a long time. Another fun fact is that many of the pictures from the album were taken at a real mortuary (thank you Brent), while others were taken at an office building. Knowing that, it’s easy to tell which is which. The DVD was excruciating to create. Knowing nothing about how to author a DVD, we decided to author a DVD. With the assistance of Bryan, the former sound guy from the Paris Theater, we all stumbled through it one hard lesson at a time. At one point nearing completion the computer with the project crashed. The data was recoverable, but upon inspection we did find the computer had cockroaches in it. To say the DVD process was sketchy is an understatement.
Those are just a few things that come to mind. Every time I listen to it, something comes back to me. Hopefully if you liked the album you have your own memories associated with it. If you want to hear it again, or for the first time, we just made the album a free download at Bandcamp. Of course we still have physical copies for sale as well.
-Eric
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