Hi Guys--
Man, it sure is cool to finally hear these albums kind of coming together! In one sense, it would have been awesome to release one big monster double album, but the only real advantage to that is the fact that it’s cool from an artistic standpoint. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense--you run the risk of bombarding people with too much material and having some stuff fall through the cracks. I like my idea of releasing them a year apart, and I hope that’s the way it ends up happening. Besides, each of the albums has sort of a distinct personality in my mind, so they work well as separate entities. This is a generalization, but it kinda seems to me that the second album has certain songs that represent everything Theocracy is, and then other songs that show different sides of us (this one is more aggressive, this one is more acoustic-based, etc.). The third album seems to have more songs that are kinda to-the-point, concise representations of what we do. To put it another way, I’d have a hard time picking a single from the new album because a lot of the songs lean in one direction or another, but I can think of 3 or 4 songs from the third album that would make great singles. Don’t let that scare you; I don’t at all mean that there’s a bunch of stuff out of left field on album 2 or that album 3 is full of 3-minute radio songs, because that’s not even remotely true. Every moment sounds like Theocracy, and nothing is forced or contrived. I’m just trying to tell kind of how it looks (in a very over-generalized way) from my perspective.
I think a lot of people probably think the album’s taking so long because I’m some weird perfectionist recluse who can never be satisfied, but it’s really just been the huge learning curve. To go from never having recorded a live drum kit a couple of years ago to getting the drum sounds we got on this album...well, it’s nothing short of a miracle. That, plus all the very intensive editing that goes on on an album like this, added up to about 5 or 6 years of experience that I had to cram into 2 years, all while writing the songs and working a full-time job. There was no shortcut, just very, very hard work and endless hours learning and experimenting. So 75% of the reason it’s taken so long has just been the learning curve. I’m so happy to report that that part of it is finally over, and it came out great! There’s still a lot of work to do, but from here on out, it’s all stuff I’ve done before, so I can just knock this thing out (Lord-willing)! No more learning curve...now it’s finally just "get the job done," and that makes me VERY happy.
We’re finally working on getting an official MySpace page up and running, so look for that soon. I’ll also put some more new music online for you guys to check out soon.
God bless and thanks for your patience!!
