| The
Grip Weeds began recording THE SOUND IS IN YOU in the little side porch of huge
old house we were renting (i.e., the House of Vibes- the name of our first album).
We'd run cables all over the house and down into the basement or sing in the bathroom
to get the sounds we wanted. Going through all 16 songs
I still find it to be a really interesting listening experience. It’s really
eerie to hear studio takes coming back at you from a different time in your life.
But I have to say that I am very proud of all the detail in our work: the composition
and the melodies really stand out; but ripping open all these tracks brings back
memories. Just a few months into the project we were
kicked out of the House of Vibes and had to find another place to set up shop
fast. We begged all our relatives for money and bought a house with a great stone
basement where we could put the studio. So, for the
next 7 months we were forced to put down our guitars and pick up drills and paintbrushes
and get the place into shape. We had to rip out sinks and walls, do wiring and
spackling- we thought of calling the album "sheet rocking" for a while! When
we finally finished the studio we had a ton of material we had been playing live
that we were anxious to start recording plus we wanted to include the newer songs
that were constantly being written. Somehow we ended up with a gigantic 16-song
album. It can get kind of overwhelming when you have your own studio- you can
just keep recording and recording...and recording! As
luck would have it, just as we completed the album the little label out of North
Jersey that was working with us on its release folded and left us in the lurch.
I was really depressed about that because I felt really deeply that SOUND had
taken such an enormous amount of work to finish and deserved to come out. Needless
to say, the band and myself are ecstatic that our newfound friends at Rainbow
Quartz now feel the same way! -Kristin Pinell The Remix
This reissue of our second album is unlike anything we've done before because
we went back and remixed the tracks from the basic elements, which involved transferring
the original analog multitrack tapes to computer. When we originally recorded
the basic tracks, we filled up all 8 tracks on the tape, and then submixed this
down to another section of tape, adding vocals and overdubs. So when we first
mixed the album, we had this premixed backing track that we were stuck with whether
we liked it or not. For the new reissue we sync'd up the original basic tracks
to the overdubs using digital software and were able to do a much more effective
mix. The idea was to make this album sound as good as or better than SUMMER...
because it is now the follow-up. -Kurt Reil The Songs
We were going for a diversity of styles and influences. Although we are frequently
associated with the '60s, we were trying to present these influences in a challenging
and contemporary way. This can be heard on our cover "Down to the Wire"
which has some of the good elements of the original but sounds nothing like it.
"Strange Bird" clearly is influenced by the Byrds, but "Everything
and All You Feel" is maybe influenced by Deep Purple. A song like "Inca"
isn't influenced by anything other than ourselves, really. We tried to cover a
lot of musical ground from power pop "Ready and Waiting" to metaphysical
"philoso-rock" "In Waking Dreams" ("philoso-rock"
was a term coined by Roger McGuinn to mean rock with philosophy in it). At the
time, the song "Intro" (and also "Outro") was an attempt at
the avante garde (these tracks were "written" by every member improvising
on his or her own track). As with all of our recordings,
"The Sound Is In You" was intended to demonstrate a leap forward from
the previous record. We don't want our records to sound the same and we want to
be able to hear discernable growth in songwriting, performance and production.
The album was designed to take the listener on a bit of a head trip. -Rick Reil The
Bonus Tracks
We also added 3 bonus tracks that were recorded
during the sessions for THE SOUND IS IN YOU: "I Can Hear the Grass Grow",
originally done in 1966 by the Move, and "Lazy Day", by the Left Banke.
Both songs make their US debut and have also been remixed for this reissue. "Outro"
was actually a hidden track on the original version, but we've now brought it
out of hiding. We called it "Outro", since it was essentially the unedited
version of "Intro" and it closes the album. -Kurt Reil Photo
Projections
The band also came up with the artwork and
packaging for the CD (another "do-it-yourself" project). We set up the
basement studio with lights and cameras and with the help of photographer friend
spent the weekend making colored projections of ourselves onto our favorite instruments.
-Kristin | 
