14/04/2020
Count Your Lucky Stars Records CONTEST INFO ON HOW TO WIN CYLS STORE CREDIT AT THE END OF POST.
CYLS 012: empire! empire! (i was a lonely estate) "What It Takes to Move Forward"
Release date: 9/29/09
Format: 2x12" Vinyl/CD/Digital/Cassette (Out of Print)
Pressing Info:
Cassette
200 Smokey Clear
CD
First Press: 1000
Second Press: 1000
Vinyl
First Press:
500 Marble Gray
500 Marble Pink
Second Press:
400 180-Gram Black
400 Ultra Clear with Gray Splatter (Disc A/B), Ultra Clear with Pink Splatter (Disc C/D)
200 Tour Press with Hand-numbered Limited Edition Screen Printed Jacket (100 of each of the 2nd Press variants)
Third Press
175 Gold
600 Half in Half: Easter Yellow/electric Blue with Double Mint Splatter
600 A/B: Sea Blue/Bone A Side/B Side C/D: Blood Red/Bone A Side/B side
- First vinyl pressing was a co-release with strictly no capital letters
- Second pressing CD and vinyl discography number differs from other variants. The release number is CYLS 012R, where "R" stands for reissue.
Co-release with strictly no capital letters and Keep It Together Records. Japanese import from stiff slack records.
CYLS Store: https://buff.ly/2RziQ2F
Spotify: https://buff.ly/2K2ju4t
Bandcamp: https://buff.ly/2RAL3Gm
Apple Music: https://buff.ly/39Zn8Xu
Soundcloud: https://buff.ly/2K1flxF
Amazon: https://buff.ly/2RrnQ9q
YouTube: https://buff.ly/2XBstSb
empire! empire! (i was a lonely estate) is my band, and this album took for what seems forever to finish, so I have a lot to say about this album. For all of these features, I've been listening to each album as I write them and I can't honestly remember the last time I've listened to this album. So it feels a bit strange to write this.
I started writing this in 2006. The songs used on "Year of the Rabbit" were recorded during the same recording sessions to give you an idea of long it took. Empire was my still kind of my solo project, so most of this album was written by me. If we're talking about all the tracks on the reissue, Cathy played guitar on 4 tracks and sang backup on a song, a couple different drummers played on a few tracks (4 and a half songs in total), and our old bassist DJ played bass on a track and sang backup vocals on two tracks. Matt from Look Mexico did guest vocals on "An Idea...". I wrote the rest of it and recorded all of it.
The recording process was a nightmare and I wouldn't suggest it to anyone. If I had to do it all over again, I think I would have gone to an actual studio, but I was broke and this option also allowed me the luxury of taking as much time as I wanted. Sometimes too much time is a bad thing. Actually, I think it's almost always a bad thing.
I had recently graduated college and was living at home at my parents' house then. My mom worked from home as a tutor for students who had difficulty reading and obviously I couldn't record while her students were there. I remember a few instances running up to sessions where I was trying to finish guitar takes and her students would show up and I would have to stop.
For "When the Sea Became a Giant", I had recorded all the drums in the basement, but there were so many incidental background noises that it picked up (furnace, running water, general basement noises) and I didn't want that to come through on this recording. My parents' were ok with me recording at their house, but didn't want me to do the drums outside of the basement for fear of me ruining the carpet or scuffing up the walls, etc. Honestly not an unfounded fear, the walls in house near the basement had some chips taken out from loading equipment in and out before.
I did a couple things to get around that. My friend's mom Jeff let me use his mom's house when she was on vacation. Jeff had filled on bass for a while during that period and we've been friends since high school. I think that worked for a couple songs.
For the rest of the songs, I waited until my parents' would leave and I would haul all of my drums upstairs to the living room after clearing it out, record as much as I safely could without them knowing, and then rearrange the room again all before they got home. I don't know if they ever found out, but we never really talked about it, haha. It took a long time to record this way.
I wasn't terrible at recording, but I was very utilitarian. I didn't know how to punch in, so the take had to be right or I had to redo the whole thing.
I recorded it all on a laptop, which at the time did not really have the processing power to really handle it. I was using a PreSonus Audio Electronics Firepod to track everything, which allowed me to have up to 8 channels. I used them all for the drums, but it was far too much for my laptop to handle. It would often lag, so even if it was a good take, I wouldn't be able to salvage it.
To get around this process, I recorded the drums in sections, so I would record all the drums for a verse or chorus, etc. and then hit the cymbals to ring over the next part. Then I would record the next section. This process worked, but keep taking over the limited amount of hard drive space my computer had. I bet if you listen hard at the end of sections you could hear me shifting in my drum stool and the clicking of the space bar to stop the recording.
I am notoriously slow at writing lyrics/vocals, so the music was completed far before the time actually got around to writing lyrics.
The entire thing was mixed, mastered, and all set to go by the early summer of that year, but we had just added a new bassist at the time and he was out of state for a few more months, so we opted to wait for him to move back home so he could in the band picture/liner notes. He did exactly one tour with us before quitting. We're still friends, but it's funny to think that both he and our drummer at the time had nothing to do with the actual recording and are featured in the recording and that we waited for months for that very reason. That was my doing, I wanted them to feel included. The reissue is just a picture of me and Cathy though.
Year of the Rabbit was originally mixed by Alex Rose from Minus the Bear, and he was slated to mix this too, but they got busy with their own band and he passed off the work to Chris Common of These Arms Are Snakes. Chris also mastered it
Chris did an incredible job- he cleaned up a lot of my messes and made it sound like one cohesive piece. I remember him flatly telling me that this would never sound like something more than a demo though, haha. I don't know that I fully agree with him on that, but it certainly could have been recorded better. But it was our first full length, so when a band has a low-quality first recording, you say that it has charm. So, this album is full of charm, lol.
I have a problem with bonus and rare tracks. It's why Empire had over 50 songs and only two full lengths. Funnily enough, the only version to not have bonus tracks was the original CD version. This was the standard at the time, and vinyl was much more uncommon. So the vinyl had a bonus track, the cassette had a different one, and so did the Japanese import. They all shared the bonus track, "It was Your Heart that Saved You". That's why there are 15 tracks.
Some quick fun things:
- At the end of "It's a Plague" there are two drum tracks a la Lucky Denver Mint by Jimmy Eat World.
- There is no bass on "It was Your Heart that Saved You". This was an oversight and I just forgot to write one and didn't realize it until it was too late.
- The first section where the drums are on "How to Make Love Stay" were added later. Our drummer at the time, Ryan Stailey, wrote that part and started doing it live, and we loved it so much that we had him add it in the recording and added a bass part to accompany it. I think it really beefed up the track. It was originally just going to have drums and bass for the build up at the end.
- My friend Joe Sak played drums on What Safe Means, and he accidentally cut out early. He was supposed to end with the bass, but we decided we liked it and kept it
- We did a five-year anniversary tour for this where we played the album in full in album order. I even brought my trumpet and we transposed the banjo to guitar for "With Your Greatest Fears...".
- Speaking of that song, that was originally going to be a bonus track for the Japanese release. I was visiting my best friend Andrew from Mountains for Clouds, and he had one in his apartment. I had never played banjo before, but it isn't that dissimilar to guitar. I came up with that, and he recorded me playing it. We decided to keep it on the actual album because it helped break it up.
- We had a special album jacket printed for the tour, designed by Alex Brown. Alex is so talented and this cover is still so cool to me.
- It was the first time at least three of those songs were ever played live.
- The art is mostly all from pictures I took in high school when I thought I was a photographer, lol. The ceramic angels on the cover were made by my mom and the doll house on the back cover was made by my dad for my sisters'.
- I took most of the pictures on the inside cover, Other photo credits go to Rich Ayers (an old bassist), Jon Steinhoff (our on-and-off again drummer), Conor Cary (co-label owner at the time), and Cathy.
- The cassette tape album cover is a picture of our cat. Abby. The bonus song on it (Archival Footage) is about her passing away as she was passing away
- The Stiff Slack version had art by Edgar McHerly.
A NOTE ABOUT THE CONTESTS:
If you haven't seen, we are also doing a series of contests to celebrate this project. Every day, we are giving away $5 in store credit to use on anything! There will 2 winners each day, here is how you can enter:
1) If you have the release of the day, take a selfie with it and reply to this post with a picture in your comments.
2) You can recreate the album cover of the album of the day. You can draw it, use Photoshop, MS Paint, whatever! Just get creative! You don't have to be a pro to win, we just want everyone to have some fun.
YOU HAVE EXACTLY ONE WEEK FOR EACH ALBUM. That is to say, you can enter for this album for up to an entire week before we hold our drawing for the winner. That means you have 7 days! Good luck!
