Produced by Steve LillywhiteEngineered by John Siket
Recorded in Feb, March, and April 1999 in Sausalito CA and Bearsville NY
Catered!
A bit about our new record... It's done. Three months ago we landed in San Francisco armed with guitars, percussion, Pasty (our new tour manager) and 11 new songs. We're glad to finally announce that the new album, "Lost and Gone Forever" will be in stores September 28th.
"Lost and Gone Forever" beat out the other title contenders "The Ides of Guster" and "When Guster Attacks" as well as latecomers "Senior Week" and "Book on Tape" mainly because it captured the lyrical sentiment of the album, even if we happened upon it in the context of lamenting 400 emails that were erased from our computer and subsequently lost forever.
We know a lot of you out there are eager to hear the album. We've been hyping it daily on our website through our Studio Journal and the reality that we now have to sit on the record for three months without sharing it is hard for us to accept too, but this waiting period allows to prepare for the release, tweak the artwork, tour Canada!? shoot our first video etc... you will have a chance to hear our first 'single' when it goes to radio in August, and our Guster Reps will be armed with an advance copy of "I Spy" (the fifth song on the disc) in about a month. Thanks for being patient. At the risk of creating the longest Guster Announcement of all time, allow us to tell you a bit about Lost and Gone Forever...
While the website diary might lead you to believe that we spent the majority of our studio time in front of the N64 playing 007 (proximity mines in the basement? sniper rifles in the stack? anyone?), the truth is that we logged slightly more recording minutes than nintendo minutes. And Steve Lillywhite, our producer, had a strong work ethic even if he couldn't work each day without first having 'his bran and strawberries'...
The sincerity of this album stems from Lillywhite and the artistic respect he had for Guster from day one. He saw us live at Irving Plaza in New York City twice, took time to understand the live energy of our band, and set out to capture on record what hadn't been captured on any of our previous records. While other producers have told us Guster can't make a record without a kit drummer, Steve told us you can't make a Guster record WITH a drummer. From that moment on, we set out to be as creative as we had to be to make a true album that accurately reflects the spirit of this band. Steve's approach to the album was a passive/aggressive one -- all the ideas came from the members of the band, but the execution of those ideas couldn't have been carried out without the experience and vision of Steve.
This means we had to be creative and experimental. We spent nearly an entire day with Adam arranging and singing a 88 part harmony on the bridge of "All The Way Up to Heaven" (track 7). We spent an afternoon getting just the right whistling performance from our contest winners on the same tune. Some songs required that we blast the drums through an entire PA system to make them larger than life and especially ambient. We made Ryan cut his vocals over and over because we knew there were was no reason to settle for anything less than the special take we eventually got from him. And we invited guests to help us keep the album interesting: Karl Denson from The Greyboy Allstars played both saxophone and flute on "Fa Fa." We added cello and violin to "Either Way." Tony Levin (bassist for Peter Gabriel) came in to play on three songs and Page McConnell from Phish added theremin to a tune at the end of the project. Otherwise, just about all the other noises on the album came from the three of us.
In a lot of ways, Lost and Gone Forever is the first real Guster album. For the first time we went into the studio backed with the resources of a record label -- a great producer and engineer, a real budget and as much time as we needed. It helped to have the strongest batch of songs we've written to date. Rather than take things over the top we decided to pay a lot of attention to detail in order to keep things real, and we hope that comes through. Except we DID have a personal chef... maybe that was a bit excessive. And the massages...
01. what you wish for (realplayer)
02. barrel of a gun (realplayer)
03. either way (realplayer)
04. fa fa
05. i spy
06. center of attention
07. all the way up to heaven
08. happier
09. so long
10. two points for honesty
11. rainy day
