2000
1000 compact discs - out of print
1. I Will Be Something
2. The World Has Come Between Us
3. Perfect
4. I Don’t Know
5. Crazy When She Cries
This was it. The one we were waiting for. The white album was recorded in hopes to score the attention of major labels and it worked. In the fall of 1999, we hired an unknown producer at the time, Greg Wattenberg. He just finished recording an unknown artist named Five For Fighting and he came down to one of our big shows at The Mercury Lounge in New York. We worked hard in pre-production reworking songs we had been playing. When we were done with this new process the songs were all transformed. They definitely were at a pro level now, so we went up to a studio in Poughkeepsie, New York and spent a few weeks up there making the best sounding recording we ever were a part of. Neil Perry, who actually had credits on Smashing Pumpkin records, was engineering. They were as excited as we were to make a breakthrough demo. It was a great experience and it definitely brought us to a new mature level in our music and recording.
These were the songs (mostly "Perfect") that caught the attention of Maverick Records and quickly after, we were in. The intro to "The World Has Come Between Us" came out so cool that we didn't even try to recreate it when we recorded our debut. We actually just used the demo intro, which is symbolic considering the first 15 seconds of our major label album was taken from a demo. The song that really took me to a new level lyrically was "I Don't Know." It was tough for me to sit and write because I knew exactly what I wanted it to be about. I sat at the piano put a microphone up and recorded about 20 minutes of me just singing words and verses. At the end, I went through it with a pen and paper and began to grab what I thought were the real words to the song. I felt like an archeologist sifting through dirt to find what I was looking for. At the end, I had about five verses and when I played it for a few people that heard it, most of them cried. The hardest part was now cutting the five verses down to three. "Crazy When She Cries" was an all-time favorite song of mine. There is only one line of lyrics in the whole song. This is what I believe makes it so hypnotizing. You are forced, like when reading a book, to let your mind wander and you fall deeper into your own thoughts. The music keeps growing like a wave and when it crashes it is one of my favorite Stage moments. As it goes, when Maverick started passing the CD out through the office and all of their contacts, they removed this track from the demo. These are the early signs of a Label that truly doesn't get it.
