Back to The Kitchen LA: Finishing Baythorne Days

When we last left The Kitchen in Los Angeles, we headed home to San Antonio after an incredible recording session that would eventually become our new EP, Baythorne Days.

For me, though, there was something else waiting when I got home: surgery.

I knew the recovery was supposed to take somewhere around four to six months. That sounded like a long time, especially with everything happening with Jet Lag Motel. But somehow, within about a month, I was feeling good and ready to run again.

And Baythorne Days wasn’t finished yet.

Sometimes You Have to Go Back

While I was recovering, we had been working on getting the songs mixed. We tried a few things, but the mixes just weren’t landing the way we wanted them to.

Eventually, the answer became pretty obvious.

Nathan Bankston had already been such a huge part of these recordings. He had produced us heavily during our sessions at The Kitchen LA, engineered the project, and knew these songs from the inside out.

Why not have Nathan finish what we had all started together?

We asked him about doing the final mixes and mastering for the Baythorne Days EP, and fortunately for us, he was pretty stoked to jump back into what he’d already helped us create.

So, on March 29, I hopped on a plane with Carisa and headed right back to Los Angeles.

Javi Colon met us at The Kitchen, where we reunited with Nathan and got straight to work.

Back in the Kitchen

That first day was long.

We hung out, listened, talked, laughed and started digging into the mixes while waiting for Steven Jasik to arrive the following day.

After a good night’s sleep, Carisa and I headed to LAX to pick up Steven. We grabbed some breakfast and then headed straight back to The Kitchen to do the real cooking.

Javi and Steven were happy to see each other. Steven and Nathan were happy to see each other. Everybody was happy.

So we figured we’d better actually get some work done.

And that’s when Nathan threw me a curveball.

“Why Don’t We Redo All the Vocals?”

As we started working on day two, Nathan casually suggested:

“Why don’t we redo all the vocals and just see what happens?”

Excuse me?

I’d just had abdominal surgery about a month earlier, involving a hernia and scar tissue from a previous surgery. Singing an entire EP again was definitely not what I’d expected to be doing when I walked into the studio that morning.

But I felt good.

So I decided to go for it.

And something pretty remarkable happened.

My diaphragm actually felt better when I sang.

Nathan’s instincts were right on point. We started going through the songs, and I found myself able to deliver the vocals in a way that felt stronger and more connected than before.

Having Javi and Steven there for moral support didn’t hurt either. Believe me, things can get a little wild in the vocal booth.

At the end of the day, though, you want to give everything you’ve got because there are people on the other side of those speakers listening. We don’t really think of those people as an audience.

We think of them as our friends.

And our friends deserve the best version of these songs we can possibly give them.

After a full day of re-recording vocals, I was licked.

But apparently we weren’t finished yet.

Steven Has an Idea…

While we were working on “I Wanna Know,” Steven heard another guitar line in his head.

That little addition turned out to be exactly what the song needed. It’s funny how that happens in the studio. You can think a song is finished, and then somebody plays one part and suddenly you can’t imagine the song without it.

Of course, Steven being Steven, he couldn’t just walk in with a guitar.

At one point, he brought an entire rack of guitars into the room.

I started filming and jokingly asked Javi where Steven was.

Right on cue, Steven walks in surrounded by all these guitars.

I’m looking at him thinking, You’re recording ONE guitar line. Which guitar are you actually going to use?

Steven’s answer?

“All of them.”

We lost it.

That’s probably one of my favorite things about making records with these guys. We take the music seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

There are a lot of laughs between the notes.

Watching Nathan Work

Once the vocals and Steven’s new guitar parts were finished, it was back to mixing.

Nathan started doing additional work on the drums, finding ways to make something that already sounded great sound even bigger.

Watching Nathan Bankston produce and mix never really gets boring. When he’s locked into a track, the guy gets busy. There are a million tiny decisions happening, and somehow all those little moves eventually become one big sound.

By then, we could finally hear Baythorne Days becoming the record we’d imagined.

We had one final day to finish everything, but Steven had to head home.

So we took him back to LAX, said goodbye, and then raced right back to The Kitchen.

There was still an EP to finish.

Baythorne Days Was Done

That final night was exhausting.

By the time Nathan finished the mixes, everybody was wiped out.

But the Baythorne Days EP was finished.

After everything that had happened, from our first trip to The Kitchen, to the unexpected changes during those original sessions, to surgery, recovery, flying back to Los Angeles and then unexpectedly re-recording an entire set of vocals, we’d made it.

And the record sounded like us.

Maybe that’s what I remember most about those sessions. Nothing ever seemed to happen exactly according to plan, but every pivot somehow made the songs better.

One Day Without Music

The next morning, Carisa and I finally had something we hadn’t had much of during the trip:

A play day in Los Angeles.

We headed down to the Arts District, messed around for the day and eventually met up for dinner with my brother Joey, my sister-in-law Farrah and my nephew Noah.

After days of staring at waveforms, talking about vocals, guitars, drums, EQs and mixes, it felt pretty great to sit around a table with family and talk about something completely different.

Instead of hearing another playback of Baythorne Days, we were hearing stories about Noah playing soccer.

And that was exactly what I needed.

It was the perfect way to end another chapter in Los Angeles.

The next day, Carisa and I headed home to San Antonio.

Baythorne Days was finished, but Jet Lag Motel wasn’t.

Not even close.

Steven and I still had another major piece of the puzzle ahead of us: building the band that would take these songs out of the studio and onto the stage.

We’ll get into that story over the next few posts.

But first, we’re going to rewind the tape even further.

Before Los Angeles. Before The Kitchen. Before Baythorne Days. Before any of this.

Next time, I’m going back to the beginning and telling you the story of how Steven and I started Jet Lag Motel.

See you at the Motel.

Brian

Jet Lag Motel