As I write this, I’m sitting in a mixing room listening to Kiss The Girl blast at me through a huge pair of speakers, and I’m watching Michael and our mixer, Trevor, make the final tweaks to the album that we’ve been working on for about five months: Still Got Legs. We’re finally getting to a point now where this project is almost done, and I’m pretty darn happy, mainly because this is an experience that I’ve never actually had with a Chameleon Circuit album before.
Back in 2008, when we were in the process of recording the first CC album, I took a three-hour trip to the producer’s house (who I won’t name and shame here) so that I could record the vocals on my final song, Friends Of The Ood. When I turned up, however, I was given the files of everything that we’d done on the album up to that point and was politely told to go away. The producer didn’t want to finish it for us, and so it just never got finished. After months of trying to find someone new who could help us out, we were eventually forced to release the music uncompleted. I’m sure that we would have been inspired to make a second album at some point, but the urge to make the most decent Chameleon Circuit album that we could, one which we didn’t have any regrets about and more importantly one that was actually finished was definitely the kick-starter for this CD.
Still Got Legs has had its fair share of producer related problems, though just with a different twist. A lot of you have probably already heard about Michael’s forced vacation to France, but to sum it up: Michael, who came over from the US to produce this second album, got stuck in France for two months due to reasons that we’re all still a little unsure about. Basically, the people at the border just didn’t like him very much and initially wouldn’t let him back into the UK, and so production of the album was moved to Paris for a month. It was nice of them to eventually let him back in, though, even if it was just for a week so that he could wrap things up here. I guess it’s our own fault really that Chameleon Circuit is cursed; we just had to name our band after the one part of the TARDIS that didn’t work properly…
Regardless of all the obstacles that were put in our way this time, though, we’re almost there. On June 3rd and 4th we had a couple of listening events where people could come and hear the album in its current state. “The last album was a great album about Doctor Who” someone said “but this is just a great album in its own right.” This comment made me really happy, and I do hope that the rest of you feel the same way if you decide to get a copy. The physical CD is currently up for pre-order (you can get it here) and it’ll be released there and on iTunes etc. on July 12th. Also, here’s the album artwork and track-list; just click on it to make it bigger:
Dude it's so pretty looking
One thing that I should mention, something that I’ve seen a fair few people bring up, is Doctor What‘s absence from the album. Unfortunately, this was one of the later songs that went through production, and we didn’t really feel like we could find a good place for it on the CD simply because it was too different from the other tracks. The choice was either to release a bastardised version of it to force it onto the album, or to release the song later and give it the treatment it deserves. It’ll be available at some point, but in the meantime you’re obviously welcome to listen to the version on YouTube as much as you like.
By the way, to the people who are nice enough to actually read this blog: sorry for neglecting you recently. As you can probably tell from the fact that my last video took me two and a half weeks to get up, I’ve been pretty busy recently and have had trouble maintaining all of my online spaces. I’ll try to be better. Over the last couple of months I started to convince myself that I wasn’t updating my blog because I didn’t really like writing blog posts, but I have actually quite enjoyed putting this one together. So, you know, maybe I’ll make a written comeback now. Maybe being the key word in that sentence.
