By Chris Moore:

I’ll always remember day sixteen as one of the high points of The 2010 Project recording sessions.  I started late morning today with the arrival of Mike Fusco.  We ended up playing all twelve songs on my 0h-so-cheap Radio Shack speakers and making a master list of “What Left to Do?” broken down task by task (i.e. bass, background vocals, harmonica, etc).

On “Socrates’ Gulps,” the only remaining track that needed electric guitar work, Mike helped me find an electric sound that was bright yet had distortion, but wasn’t too grungy.  I still haven’t completely mastered my Zoom guitar pedal, which is significantly more nuanced than my original Zoom pedal, so after some hit and miss there, we plugged in directly from the amp, and I played while Mike found levels and balances that sounded great.  After several mess-ups and false starts, I got a take that sounded great.

Mike captured one of the good ones, so I’m finally posting a recording session video for you:

Before he left, we rocked out to “Goodbye, So Long” with me on acoustic and Mike on bass, which was great fun.  We just played a couple days ago (Thursday) to an assortment of tracks, including my songs, new and old (from “The One for Me” and “You Will Thank Me” to MoU staples “Please Stay,” “Marissa,” and “Goodbye”) and Mike’s classics (like “You I Won’t Forget”) and lesser known gems.  For Thursday’s songs, I alternated between twelve- and six-string acoustic/electric and Mike traded off between twelve-string acoustic/electric and drums.

Now, that was a LOT of fun, and it served as just the boost I needed to get excited for this weekend and this coming week, which promise to hold — finally — the final sessions for my new album.

Look, Ma: no pedal! (Me adding a "phaser effect" on my electric)

After a late lunch, I worked out the harmonica solo (in the key of E, the closest I had) and harmonies to “Goodbye, So Long.”  In terms of background vocals, I tried some things I haven’t tried before, so I’ll have to run them by my producer before giving that track the final nod…

Me and my high-tech studio set up

And that about brings this up to date.  Thank you for reading, and stay tuned this week for hopefully many more updates, photos, videos, a final cover image, and…

…drum roll, please…

…a release date!