In August of 2007 Dario returned to Montreal to continue with his teaching career. In September Dave asked Darrin and Phil if we were interested in startin up a Marillion cover band on the side partly in order to keep playing and get us ready to record, whenever that might be. Both of us were interested and after responding to an ad in Now Magazine Aaron Ruimy took on the Bass responsibilities. Mike Graham, our old keyboardist from the 80s was brought in on Keyboards. At the end of our second practice in December Aaron mentioned that he was in school at Harris Institute for sound engineering and would we be interested in doing a recording project with him and his group including Ian Gomes, Alex Wilmer and Kaitlyn Reining. We could record a full album in a proper studio as their engineering project. After discussing whether we could pull it off for about 10 seconds we agreed.
The band then voted on which of the 16 unrecorded songs (see Fugit 2) we wanted to record. The results were: Just Another Day, New Path, Presence, Soap Stains, Shallow Water Blackout, The Poetry Song, Drownproofing, Do You Know What I Mean?, Migrations and Dodgy. Over the first few weeks of December Darrin recorded 4 track demos of all the songs with a click track, vocals, and acoustic guitars as a guide for the recording itself.
The first recording session was 10AM Saturday December 29-10AM Sunday December 30 2007. Phil recorded the drums for the 10 songs which were selected and was done by 1AM. From 1:30AM to 9:30AM Darrin recorded about 25 electric, 6 string and 12 string acoustic rhythm guitar tracks.
The second session took place from 10PM-10AM Saturday/Sunday January 5/6 2008. During this session Darrin recorded all lead and back up vocals. Michael Graham added backing vocals and Dave recorded some lead guitar parts.
The third session took pace from 12AM-10AM on Sunday January 13 2008. Dave recorded lead guitar tracks. Darrin added some additional guitar parts and Mike worked on several songs after driving back and forth across the city several times in order to increase his stress levels.
The final session was held from 12AM-10AM on Sunday January 26 2008. Dave worked on his remaining guitar parts. Dario recorded all his bass parts and Mike transferred and recorded parts for the songs he had worked on remotely during the previous week (including Shallow Water Blackout, Just Another Day, Drownproofing, New Path, Migrations and Presence).
After several aborted mixing attempts we decided to go back to Vyner Road and with Elliott Sairan mixed the album between August 2009 and October 2010. Mastering was also done at Vyner Road in October after which we had Duplium press the cds. The album was released on November 15 2010.
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