One year ago today: through me you enter eternal pain.

On January 6, 2020, Mission district of San Francisco, we finished recording the last song for the city of woe record. It ended up being a cover of Neil Young’s Classic Cortez the Killer.

The song was built around my ukulele part, and although I imagined I would be able to play guitar and sing at the same time, it’s not really what happened. But I delivered one pretty flawless vocal take except the lyrics were all out of order. However, the out of orderNess seem to make the song make sense in a way that was different than the original, so we kept it. I was exhausted, emotionally, and 12 hours of recording a day as a vacation is not intended to be relaxing. But the next morning I was able to get up, and join John in the studio after he had spent the morning mixing at a very low volumes he uses to preserve his hearing.

Mixing on an old neve console is both intuitive and a little bit magical. Every stage is transformer isolated, which means every gain stage allows you to change the tone as you go from equalizer to bussing, and equipment for effects in that studio is really I think a beauty, or at least it was while it lasted. None of us knew at the time that the pandemic was going to come and make this one of the very last records ever recorded in that space.

my personal the city of woe was about to become a world of woe.

That line, by the way, Is from the Robert Pinsky translation of Dantes inferno.

The inscription above the gates of hell, at least from my memory, reads something like “through me you enter the city of woe/

Through me you enter eternal pain

no things before me were eternal,

but a ternal I remain

Abandon all hope ye who enter here”

A fitting a way to welcome to 2020 and the horror it would bring