Joy. The Machine.

Ooh so here's my new blog. Wonder how long i'll keep this up to date for.. haha. I really liked the look of this template.. but it was a bit bare and unfinished so i made some tweaks. The artwork in the top right is by an artist called Blaine Fontana. He worked on Emme's new album artwork actually. Check out his work at totembookmedia.com.

Yeah so.. anyway for the past 4 or so months i've been working on Emme Packer's new album - "Joy. The Machine." which is now finished! Sent the master CD's off to her today. While i was in America, I spent the first couple of months recording all the songs with Emme on my portable 8 track - a very tedius little piece of equipment, at least when you're recording a full-length album and can only use batteries..we ended up getting through around 3-400 no joke!

On the album there's 3 songs whereby i wrote the music and Emme put lyrics to them - i really enjoyed that kind of collaboration.. Emme was so quick with pumping out good lyrics so those songs came together really nicely. She wrote the rest of the songs and i wrote my guitar parts for them. So overall.. working on "Joy. The Machine." was a great experience. Working on her 2nd album "Better Luck Next Time" was good too, but having to do the entire album over the internet was time consuming and hard to communicate ideas through. It was just a case of recording something.. emailing it.. waiting for the approval.. etc. Come to think of it, that's what ended up happening with this album too... nevermind.

But anyway I think this time.. actually being there with Emme allowed us to bring more out of her songs... continuously bouncing ideas off of each other etc. My visa for the states ran out at the end of September so it was time to leave and finish off the album at home in England. This is where i was really able to get my hands dirty and bring the songs to life a bit more, by adding basslines, piano, strings, percussion.. and re-working the mixes. And that's pretty much all i've been doing these past couple months. I think the album is a huge step up from her previous one. The songs are better, her voice is stronger - this time round she reveals more diversity with her voice and harmonies and everything just sounds more.. complete :).

There's a preview of "Joy. The Machine."on her myspace page (http://www.myspace.com/emmepacker) so check it out! Release date will be sometime in January.. probably early to mid.