While there were some writing sessions in New York last April, most of the songs truly took their form on the road, as David and his band (David, Kevin Young, Steve Zsirai, Chris Taylor-Munro, myself) toured the Strange Birds record across Canada twice in 2007. Each city would offer a new chance to tweak and perfect arrangements, and it made sense to record the tracks with the “live band” feel.

In a two-day session at Base Bin rehearsal studios, we record the basic tracks for the record. From there, we went to Fred St-Gelais’ studio, and had Chris re-record all the drum tracks, as he played along with the band on tape from the Base Bin sessions.

We then set up shop in an apartment in Montréal that David and his family was staying in after recently moving from the East Village, New York. Here, we re-recorded all the bass, guitars and keyboards, as well as the lead and backing vocals. It was an amazingly efficient process.

The entire album was recorded on my MacBook Pro using Apple’s Logic Pro 8 and a MOTU 828mkII firewire audio interface.

Once we were satisfied we had all the right elements in place, we took the tracks back to Fred’s studio, where he mixed and mastered the album.

You can hear the first single, Kill The Lights, on David’s MySpace page right now, or buy it digitally via iTunes.

The cover was designed in collaboration with David, and the simple, understated “nouveau-disco” theme really works with the music. I’ll post the full DigiPak artwork once it has been finalised. The iTunes “Digital Booklet” version is also now complete.

The site design is clean and simple, matching the “nouveau-disco” theme of the album cover design and layout.

Built on the WordPress platform, I upgraded to the latest version, adding some new spam-filters to combat comment spam. I also created a WordPress plug-in called “dutube” which allows David to attach YouTube clips to his blog posts, but using a custom video player rather than the default YouTube one.

To add motion to the pages, I removed the Flickr photo badge, and wrote my own code, using the Flickr API and a JavaScript library called jQuery, to grab a series of recent fan photos. The code cycles through the photos automtically using a fade transition, and allows the site visitor to manually cycle through as well.

The phpBB3 forums were also re-skinned the fit within the design, and the reaction seemed to be quite positive.

> Check it out: DavidUsher.com

Roger’s vocal abilities are amazing. He had me come down to Homework Studios, where I laid down acoustic guitar tracks on two of his new songs. I’ll fill you in with more details as the project progresses. This album will co-incide with a new Food Television show called “Everyday Exotic”, which Roger will be hosting in the fall.