ALABAMA THUNDERPUSSY "Erik Larson: "So here we were a month prior to pre-production and once again singer less. We decided to just keep writing and quietly look for a singer. This ended up being the best thing we could have done. The extra time enabled us to really dig into the songs we had as well as write a few more, making the album a better beast in the long run." Based in Richmond, Virginia since 1996 and fueled by a desire to play dirty, kick ass hard rock 'n metal, Alabama Thunderpussy continue to blaze ahead with their latest album, called "Open Fire", due out on Relapse. Armed with a new singer, Kyle Thomas [of Exhorder & Floodgate-fame], the band is currently gearing up for a full US tour, starting March 8th at the Volume 11 Tavern in Raleigh, NC. Meanwhile ATP's Erik Larson talks to Roadburn about the making of Open Fire: "We came at this record with a different approach this time. We wanted to just strip it all down to the essentials and really try to capture what we sound like just setting up and playing the songs. There was no fancy Mic. techniques, no doubling of guitar tracks, no multi amp layering. It truly was plug in and play. We tried to get as much live performance keep able as possible." Words | Erik It has been a while since we recorded Open Fire, so I’m gonna do my best here to relay how it all went down. I find that musicians either love recording or hate it. I happen to be in the former category in that I love recording as much as I enjoy playing live. The whole process of bringing what you have worked on for a long time to fruition is really satisfying to me. Open Fire was especially cathartic due in no small part to the long period of time it took to make, from the initial beginnings of writing the album, to the final mixes being approved. In all, the record from start to finish took over a year to make. When we got home from touring with C.O.C. in the summer of 2005, we had been out for seven months that year, almost the entire time. We decided to take a 2 week break and dig into writing. Dig in we did, it wasn’t long before we had a sizable chunk of new material. The plan was to get into pre-production by January and start recording in February of 2006. By late November we had an albums worth of material and were fine tuning the songs. This is where the problems started emerging. Really I should say singularly problem. We still had not heard basically anything in way of vocals from Johnny Weills. When he did come to practice, which was more often than not a rare occasion complete with dozens of excuses, he would usually just sit in the corner and chain smoke cigarettes. Though frustrating, I still had faith that he would get it done, even if I had to physically sit him down in front of my four track, hand him a Mic., and press record for him, which I did end up having to do. His first attempts proved difficult, so it was agreed that he would take the four track home and bring back finished songs that "He had been working really hard on" to practice the following week for us to review and nitpick just like any other part of the music. A week passed, and sure enough a much more animated and eager Johnny Weills returned with the tapes. We practiced, and I took the tapes home to listen to and transfer to a non four track listen able form. When I started to play them, my heart sank and suspicions were validated. All the hard work and daily song writing the band had been doing for months shined in the music, but Johnny Weill’s vocals were utter garbage. It was just fucking terrible, all of it. It literally sounded like he spent five minutes thinking about each song after listening to cannibal corpse and trying to mimic a howling gorilla all afternoon. It was bad, real bad. I played the tapes for the band and we all agreed we had two options: 1. Get a new singer, and fast. 2. Give Johnny the benefit of the doubt and get him to try again. Alabama Thunderpussy is a band first and foremost, so we always try to work through the difficulties helping each other as best we can, so we went with option two. So when Johnny Weill’s arrived for practice that Wednesday afternoon and sat down next to me, I let him have it. I told him that I thought it was garbage and that he spent no time on it all of it. Understandably so, he was upset, but in the end it was agreed that he would try again and come back in a week. As he was walking out the door I told him "get a bottle and have some fun with it, you can do better, I know you can." I guess I was wrong. By Saturday afternoon, Johnny Weills had packed up his things while his roommate went to the store, moved out of town to New York, cut off his phone service, and quit the band in an email. I came to learn later that he had been using serious amounts of hard drugs all season, hence the miserable quality of his voice on the tapes, which we dubbed "The Awful Truth." So here we were a month prior to preproduction and once again singer less. We decided to just keep writing and quietly look for a singer. This ended up being the best thing we could have done. The extra time enabled us to really dig into the songs we had as well as write a few more, making the album a better beast in the long run. The departure of Weill’s also opened the door for Kyle Thomas to enter the fold, and thank good ness he did. Kyle definitely brought a musicality to the vocal department of ATP that I for one have always wished for. I feel the back story prior to us getting into the studio is just as much a part of making this record as the actual recording of it. A lot of times member changes can kill a band, especially a vocalist change. For us though, it was just another hurdle that needed to be overcome because we believed in this band then and now, and this album we were getting ready to make. By the mid summer of 2006 we had done all the preproduction demos and had set dates to enter the studio for the end of August all the way through September. Time had come to either stand and deliver, or sit down and remain silent permanently. As anyone who has made a record will tell you, the first few days is a whole lot of drums. Getting the tones, adjusting microphone placement, tuning and retuning the heads, and in Bryan’s case, swapping out snare drums. Then of course you gotta do the same for everyone else. We came at this record with a different approach this time. We wanted to just strip it all down to the essentials and really try to capture what we sound like just setting up and playing the songs. There was no fancy Mic. techniques, no doubling of guitar tracks, no multi amp layering. It truly was plug in and play. We tried to get as much live performance keep able as possible. The way we proceeded was to just play through the songs until we had good drum takes. Bryan usually nailed it within three takes for each of 14 songs we recorded. Unlike the last record we did "Fulton Hill", my life did not afford me the ability to spend every waking moment at the studio with four jobs and a pregnant wife at home and working as well, so it was important for me to finish my tracks as fast as I could without compromising on the performances. We also made a conscious effort to give Ryan a wide birth for solos this time around, which allowed me to focus on nailing down the rythymn on each song. Oh sure, there are guitarmonies all over the place on the record, but for the most part, I didn’t have to think in solo land. Not my thing anyway, and Ryan is such a phenomenal lead player, it worked out for the best and benefit of the album. It ended up taking me just nine hours to get all my parts done. Mikey went 3rd. He was able to keep most of his performances, but he’s such a perfectionist, he took longer than I know he was hoping for, a little friendly band jibing gave him the new nick name of "Short Work Bryant." Ryan blazed through his tracks pretty quickly, but all in all with his solos took a few days to finish up. Kyle lives in New Orleans still, which isn’t really a problem except that after two days of singing for 8-9 hour blocks, he had really worn out his voice and still had a bit more to do. So we waited it out and flights were rescheduled finally completing all the tracking well under our scheduled time frame. This gave us more time to focus on mixing. Kyle went back to New Orleans, so we were sending mixes over the web for his input and approval almost every other day. We did the mixing at Ian’s house as opposed to the studio we tracked in, The Etching Tin. It took a while to get the levels where everyone wanted them to be and there were definitely some heated debates about guitar levels. It got kinda ugly at times, but at the end of the day it was always back to one question: "What best suits the album?" It was a mantra for the entire year long process. A mantra that I suspect will continue to make itself known as the touring begins and continue into the next record. Hopefully when everyone hears Open Fire, it will ring true for y’all as well.