State Fruit (Featuring Mike Hopkinson)

On July 4th, 2005 I decided to skip the parades and festivities. I had just bought a lot of recording equipment and my friend Mike Hopkinson proposed that we play music that day. He'd been playing drums for a little less than a year I think, but he was so natural.

We composed this song in a few hours and recorded it immediately to hard drive. I used my friend's Paul Reed Smith guitar on this song, played through a Fender Princeton amp. This was my first experience using a Sennheiser cabinet mic (which I still use to this day), so I achieved a real "studio-esque" guitar track. I played electric guitar with Mike on drums live onto the recording; we had no isolation of instruments in his basement, save for the fact that my amp was turned, facing opposite to his drums on the other side of the basement. I went in later that afternoon to overdub the bass guitar and acoustic guitar parts.

At the time I was listening to a lot of the Gamehendge songs by Phish, and you can definitely tell by listening to the minor sevenths and muted strumming pattern in each part of this song. I truly feel like the only thing this song lacks is a light sax (or other horn) melody. Still, I present the recording to you now in its preserved form, as it was recorded on Independence Day.