River Tracks
This may not look like much, but it's a piece of my history. It's the former site of River Track Studio, where Stuart, Jessica, and I recorded our first album as U.S. 52, our old band.
It was the summer of '99, right before our senior year started. Ever since 8th grade or so, Stuart and I had recorded songs in his bedroom/recording studio at every opportunity. In the earliest days, the sophisticated recording process included one boombox with a microphone on it. One of us would hit "Record," and we'd proceed to put a take or two on a cassette. Naturally, this allowed for at most three instruments per song, not including vocals: one that we'd each play, and possibly a pre-programmed Casio keyboard drum beat or piano part. Sometimes we'd get fancy and overdub a second layer of parts using another boombox playing the previous tracks simultaneously. We filled up countless numbers of 90-minute cassettes with our noodling, and "released" eight or nine 60-minute albums under various names.
As time passed, some of our friends and family would come in and play with us, expanding our instrumentation possibilities. Most of the time, it was just the two of us. The complexity and quality of the songs we created naturally grew greater as we improved our playing. By this point, it was mainly Stuart coming up with the basic idea of the song. I would fill in some of the gaps with a bassline or maybe a keyboard part, and Stuart's girlfriend at the time, Jessica, would sing background vocals and fill in some saxophone parts. It was with this line-up that we were coming up with songs that we really liked and that we thought other people would possibly like, too.
Thus, at the end of the summer of '99, we picked a few songs that would be the most likely to sound good on a "real" album and made a deal with a friend of both our families, Otis, the man who owned River Track. He made us a good deal on using the studio, since money was the main concern at the time. We loaded all of our stuff into my '94 Olds and headed over to Louisa to play for a few afternoons in a row sometime in August.
I can vividly remember passing through those doors, exiting the sweltering heat and entering an underground world of bluegrass instruments and publicity photos tacked to the walls. Strange duplicating machines lined the main hall, which ended in the front desk. Cassettes and CDs piled high in every available corner. It took us a while to set up our instruments and figure out what we wanted to do, but after a while, the whole studio aspect came more naturally to us. We even relaxed enough to come up with an instrumental right there on the spot one day. I do believe that the excitement that we were actually doing what we'd only dreamed of for years helped to cancel out the learning curve that's involved when singing and playing in a studio environment.
In a way, those days were a new step musically for us, and we certainly learned a lot about how to structure and piece together songs. When I listen to the recordings from those sessions, I realize how much better we've gotten as musicians since then, but I'll also remember the sense of wonder at actually completing a project like that, in a real-live studio. If nothing else, it encouraged us to keep up with playing and writing songs, since we're still doing that today.
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