Since the last entry, we’ve cancelled a practice (due to my illness and other reasons), the website has been down and brought back up again, and there’s been doubt as to whether we’d be playing the annual gig at Jeremy’s parents’ place in Somerset. It’s all so very Behind the Music.

We did practice on Monday night (the 9th), however. What did we record? Nothin’. Basically it was just a practice. We went through a bunch of songs, mostly originals. Most of them are in pretty good shape. I had us go through “Martyrs & Devils” twice because I hated the way I sounded the first time. I was getting over a cold, and that always makes me feel like I have to learn how to sing all over again. That’s actually not as bad as it sounds, since I never learned to sing in the first place.

We played “The Folly (Dr. Moreau)” for the first time in months, clocking it in at eleven minutes. Our record on that one is something like eighteen minutes, but we can live with eleven considering how long it had been since the last time. We tried to resurrect “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith, which was kind of weak because we haven’t played that either since last August and it was never dead-on to begin with. We also spent some time working on our cover of “Roxanne” by the Police, with an innovative new technique we thought we’d try, just to see if it could help keep us together: counting! You’d be amazed at how successful the most arcane things can be. Our homework for next week is to re-learn “Just” by Radiohead. We played it a party in February, and it was fine then, but when we played in on Monday it was pretty poor. Jeremy gave us a homework assignment to relearn it by next practice. I guess I’d better get on that. Radiohead music is not like our Earth music.

We also worked on the new songs a little. Richard doesn’t seem to have words yet for his jaunty D-major tune (or if he does, he’s not sharing), so we just jammed on it some more. We went through Jeremy’s new song a few times as well. He’s not really happy with it yet, possibly because there doesn’t seem to be much to differentiate the verses from the choruses. We tried doubling the length of the bridge, and that helped a little, but now he’s going to have to write that many more words. Then we spontaneously busted into a jazz version of it (sparked by Pete, I think), and that seemed to lift Jeremy’s malaise quite a bit. Whether we’ll stick with that version or not remains to be seen, although I guess it’s dependent on whether we can remember what we did. We’ll keep you posted. As for Jeremy’s new sad song, he doesn’t really trust himself to write the lyrics for it so he’s farming the job out to someone else. Specifically, someone who wrote the lyrics of “Adornments.” Also, Jeremy’s working on lyrics to what we call “the funky song.” If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it. There’ll be plenty to worry about when the time comes.

We spent some time working on “Boomtown,” which is good. The thing about “Boomtown” is that it’s a really demanding song. There’s all these unconventional two- and three-part harmonies all the way through it. It used to be our strongest song. Of course, that was back when we only had ten or so songs anyway, and we tended to spend as much as an hour per practice working on getting it down. In the past year or so, we haven’t spent as much time on it, so it got a lot worse. Imagine that. Anyway, I think the time we’ve spent trying to get it recorded has made us realize the need to bring it back up to snuff. So on Monday we went through it three or four times. The last time was quite a bit better than the first time, which is always encouraging. The harmonies are getting tighter again. I think we’ve all agreed that we need to keep practicing this one a lot, just to bring it back to the point where we can look forward to performing it live again.

Speaking of which, we’re going to be playing a Jeremy’s annual birthday pool party bash next month – Saturday, August 11 to be precise. Third year in row. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already been invited; otherwise you can try to finagle an invite by e-mailing Jeremy. For reasons I won’t go into here, I wasn’t sure if we should do it, but my concerns have been allayed. We’re looking forward to it. I just hope it doesn’t rain again. There was some sprinkling the first year, but nothing major. Last year there was a full-blown thunderstorm between our second and third sets. This can be inconvenient when you’re playing in a garage and your audience is in the driveway. However, let’s put things in perspective: while we were cowering in the house, some people got killed by lightning at the rock festival going on just a few miles down the road. I think that tells you all you need to know about which concert you should be at. Maybe that should be on our t-shirts: “Enjoy Krakathoom—or DIE!”

Right now that’s the only gig in our immediate future, despite Rob’s heroic efforts on our behalf. He’s a little frustrated that he’s left all these messages at all these places and nobody has called him back. So let’s just say if you were on Rob’s list, and you haven’t returned his message, now you’re on his other list. If you know what I mean. And I think you do.

Maybe things will get better once we have a demo out there. When we cancelled last week’s practice, Jeremy said he wanted to work on recording some of his own parts that night anyway. I forgot to ask him what he accomplished. I’m not sure how the recording project is going to affect our schedule in terms of preparing for the gig; fortunately we don’t have a schedule, so it’s probably not a biggie. It would be nice if we had a CD to sell at the gig (“Hi, friends and supporters, thanks for coming to hear us all these times, now give us money), even if it was only five or six songs, but maybe we’ll be concentrating on practicing for the live show. Not that we’ve decided that. What do you say, KrakaFans? Would you rather be able to buy a CD and listen to us suck live, or would you rather wait a while longer for your CD and listen to us suck less?

On the technological front, this website you’re visiting right now has had its server relocated to…the KrakaTomb! As Richard says, “Yep, the site is being served FROM THE SAME CIRCUIT as our instruments. If you turn your computer's speakers way up you can almost hear us playing.” But then, if you visited the message board, you’d already know that. So get to the message board, already! The coolest stuff is happening, and you’re missing it! Go, go, go!