"We Are Not Alone" out soon on Plustapes

The Dust Bunnies new album "We Are Not Alone" will be out in about a month or two on Chicago's best cassette label Plustapes!

I can't thank Matt Wenzel and Billy Helmkamp enough. I emailed them wondering if anyone would release a Dust Bunnies album and the next thing I knew, I had an email from Dustin at Plustapes and it said Billy and Matt both told him about Dust Bunnies and he was interested in putting something out. I just handed Dustin final mixes on Tuesday, art work is still being developed, but the tape will be out soon!

I recorded "We Are Not Alone" in my apartment between January and February of 2011. Though, I did not have a game plan hardly at all. Instead, a great and organic thing happened. The album emerged like a path through dark woods.

It was greatly inspired by when I was in New Jersey in December. My brother and I took turns showing each other songs on the guitar, I learned a lot of Genesis songs and, by the time I came back to Chicago for New Years, I had two or three loose sketches for "an album" but had no idea what the bigger picture was. I wanted one side to have longer drone-y songs inter-worked with short bits and pieces.

I started tracking the baritone guitar to a click track just playing what would be A to G on a normal guitar. I tried to leave space so that multi-tracking would be able to more cleanly fill in the beats and I had a Harald Grosskopf record stuck in my head. The result was a rough track of what would end up being "Flugzeug", the first song on the album. I listened back, added a phaser on the organs and some regimented but simple drums and the song seemed to grow and turned from late-70s German synth into late 60s psych.

There was no light at the end of the tunnel for me. There was no "this is the way I've always made albums, so this is the way I'll make this album". Everything was touch and go and trial and error. I'd never played a C-baritone guitar, used a Zoom recorder or the recording program I used for this album.

I had no list of songs. I had no lyrics! I had no drummer!!

But, all these things are just parameters to get used to and tired of. So, I used this to my advantage. Just holding on to hope that the end result would be good if I worked hard enough and that if I just made something I wanted to listen to that other people would like it too.

So, going into this record with the chords for "Novocaine" and maybe a song about an airplane and ending up with this completed album is mind-blowing to me. This may be the best album I ever made.

But, that is of little importance. Sure it is important to make music you like and to make yourself happy before making other people happy. My point is that I made it for YOU!

Sitting in a one-bedroom apartment for two months straight in the dead of winter with only a few tiny amps, a tinier recorder, no songs and a lot of cold air no doubt had a cabin-fever effect. I couldn't reach out to other people physically so much, so instead I tried my hardest to reach out to other people musically. I imagine that there are a lot of people who have a hard time leaving the house in winter, and some that have a hard time leaving the house any time.

So, I'll say this: If you feel like you have nothing cool to say to people, if you feel like your brain is a big wad of spaced-out shot nerve endings, if you convince yourself out of going to shows or parties, if you feel like you can't relate to anyone else, "We Are Not Alone". And spring is just around the corner.

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