Let’s Get Physical

When the test pressings for New Love Stories arrived a few weeks ago, I missed FedEx by minutes. When you miss a package, you can wait a day or two for redelivery or drive to a distribution hub outside of town to pick it up. I headed out there that evening. I was pet-sitting a very sweet dog who enjoys riding in the car, so I took her with me. It was pouring rain. 

When we got to the facility, the delivery driver hadn’t yet arrived at the end of their route. So I turned the car off and waited in the parking lot for an hour before I finally got the pressings in my hands. Then the car wouldn’t start. I was 20 miles outside of town, with a dog, in a car that wouldn’t start on a rainy night. Up to that point, everything that could go wrong in the manufacturing process seemed to have done so.

This wasn’t the first difficulty in this process. For a while, I wasn’t sure I’d even get the test pressings — let alone the albums themselves — before our May 3 release date. The first lacquer our mastering engineer cut for side 2 was damaged in transit to the pressing company; the damage was undetectable until the initial set of test pressings revealed it. So we needed to have a new one cut. The second lacquer was fine, but then there were problems in the plating process, which tied up some more time. I’d started biting my nails.

I eventually got the car started that night and brought the test pressings home. The next afternoon I listened to them on an extremely nice sound system at Richmond’s Audio Exchange. They sounded glorious. Everyone involved had done a stellar job solving each of the problems along the way.

Earlier this week, FedEx delivered the completed vinyl albums. The driver and I carried the 11 boxes up to my 3rd floor apartment where they joined the posters and CDs in a great big pile on my living room floor. 

Making real, actual recorded albums is a lot of trouble. But when I cracked the first box open and held a copy of this album in my hands, I felt how worth it it’s all been. We are so eager to share this music — and these physical objects — with you. 

If you haven’t ordered your copies yet, don’t worry. They’ll be for sale at the release show on May 4 at The Basement. Tickets are available now.