Liner Notes
Anhedonia was recorded in Fords, NJ between July and December 2005 and mixed and mastered between January and April 2006. All songs were written and all instruments were played by Michael Hattem except bass guitar on all songs played by Rich Stillwell and lead guitar on “Yellow Roses” and “All I Could” by Ryan Townsend.
This record was recorded on a used Dell PC with 512mb RAM, a $50 microphone, a $30 preamp, a $200 acoustic guitar, a borrowed electric guitar, and a Yamaha keyboard restored by a neighbor after he found it in the garbage drenched in beer.
Toward the end of 2005, after six months of work on the record and with all of the tracking done, the external hard drive containing the files died. However, after thinking for a month that all the work had been lost for good, I was able to find a tech to recover the data by taking the disc out of the enclosure and putting it in another. There were data reading issues (mostly related to speed) for the rest of the mixing and mastering process but it eventually all got done.
The cover art was created by a friend of a cousin who used almost entirely images from the lyrics of the record to create the cover.
Another interesting note, the end of the final song “On Your Way (Coda)” concludes with a scratchy voice speaking, which is my grandfather who died in 1952. When he was in the army in the early 1940s, they used to have a phonograph recorder in the Officers’ Club and they would record themselves talking to their wife or family and then send the 78rpm record home. My father found one he had sent my grandmother in the attic when I was mixing the song and I ripped it into my PC and cleaned up as much of the noise as I could (which was a lot). Then I sampled a part of it and used it as the ending to the record where he says: “Well I finally got around to making this, uh, record and I find I don’t know what to say. You know I miss you an awful lot. Matter of fact I miss you so much I can’t put it into words. You probably don’t believe that though. Say how about….”
National Steel 