Daytrotter’s week without a working toilet or shower started on a Monday night, as our posse of four slunk into the city of Austin, Texas before it completely lost its ever-loving ability to think and operate rationally. We crossed into the city limits before every shack, lean-to and taco house was turned into a live music venue. SOUND Team bassist Bill Baird, one of our nine hospitable hosts (we’ll count the four cocksure roosters in the neighboring yard among the nine that includes the other members of the Team – Matt Oliver, Gabe Pearlman, Jordan Johns and Will Patterson) greeted us at the gate in some cheap, cereal box shades (later in the week Oliver found a pair with Long John Silver’s printed on the ear flaps and they were much envied over; don’t be surprised if they become the Daytrotter eyewear of choice as the prevalence of them couldn’t help but become influential) and some white trousers. He gave us an ensemble of “Bill Looks” that over the course of the week, we got better at deciphering, but they retained their enigmatic qualities quite well. He told us the neighborhood was – long pause – safe and laidback, that there were two coffeehouses within walking distance (these would be where we made toilet, but the yard was for the No. 1s whenever they happened) and then left us to plug things in, put things together and get acquainted with our new home. The studio sits at the far end of a compound that the members of the band cleared out of garbage – literally dead animal carcasses, soiled diapers and decaying trash – when they moved in, took it over and converted it into a place where bands like Spoon and …Trail of Dead choose to make records. It’s also where the band made the underappreciated (you know who you are) Movie Monster and where they choose to hang out, with a small garden a lean-to, some picnic tables, chairs and couch. A SXSW party there in 2006 involved SOUND Team, Voxtrot and Dr. Dog playing in the Big Orange. There were two kegs and a hired mime who pretended to open the door for you (not a joke) before the cops came in and busted up the gathering. There was history within these walls. By the end of the week, the outdoors portion of the studio would smell noticeably of piss, but we left everything else as we found it. After loading all of the requisite Daytrotter recording equipment and sleeping bags into the Big Orange, we sought refuge at the closest and most friendly joint we could spot – a coffeehouse/bar called Rio Rita’s. Not only did Rita’s have a high-speed wireless Internet connection, which we learned from a highway billboard on the trip south was actually La Quinta in Spanish, but it had a very friendly owner in a woman named Donya, bottle of Coca-Cola from Mexico (pure cane sugar!), great coffee, Bix Beiderbecke in the jukebox, some delicious pear cider, a Centipede video game, but it also had near solitude as the doors had just opened the week we arrived and people were yet to discover it. It was just what we needed.

Our initial day of recording started early with SOUND Team rehearsing at 9 a.m. Seniors Stolley and Kopplin used them as guinea pigs. They were willing and we tracked one song over the two-hour practice. We tracked a brand new, 8 ½-minute song on Wednesday for a cool two-song set that will be brought out sometime this summer. Most of the first day in Austin was spent on the natives – bands that always call the state capital home. Other than our first band of the day – The Little Ones, all others just came from across town or, in the case of Red Hunter of Peter and the Wolf, from just around the corner, where he’s renting for a couple of months and rehearsing his 14-strong choir of songbirds. It rained most of the day – big pailfulls of water, or so it sounded on the mostly tin roof of Big Orange. For two sessions, it couldn’t have been more appropriate and the drops pelting above us penetrated all the way onto the tape we had running. It added another tint of authenticity to the stunning songs of Jared Van Fleet’s Sparrow House and Hunter’s set of four all new Peter and the Wolf tunes that even the gentle warmth of the tape couldn’t. The Little Ones were early and coming to a realization that the Yahoo! corporate party they played the evening before had culminated in a trip to a strip club called Sugars and them somehow getting kicked out. Voxtrot were solid and tight, just months short of the release of their debut full-length on Beggar’s Banquet. Tacks, The Boy Disaster – the next huge thing soon to be known everywhere outside of Austin – recorded a session that ranks as one of the top five of 26 that we recorded in Austin. Following the last recording of the day, Baird returned and turned on the 36 televisions, all plugged into their own DVD players. He hypnotized us with the Jumbotron video footage that he recorded and then made into a collage that he synchronized in an altered state. It was like a drug – Bill the drug lord. Our beds – the floor of the control room – were hard, but manageable.