Since fall of 2012, Blue Rising’s lineup has remained consistent:  Luke Narey on drums, Austin Mudd on lead guitar, Barrett Abraham on bass, and myself as lead vocalist and guitarist.  The songs for the first record came quickly.  The songs Be, All That Is, Away From Here, and Circle of Doors were originally written by Mudd and myself in the years prior to Blue Rising’s formation, and fine tuned in the Blue Rising rehearsal space.  The rest of the songs, including Paradigm and Bones were fresh new originals that we wrote as a group.  We had energy.  We were hungry.  We believed in what we were doing.  We played shows.  We won more battles of the bands.  We were building momentum. In 2013, we went into the studio to begin the recording process.  We had won 10 hours of studio time at Rich Morpurgo’s Midwest Audio Recording from the first battle we had won together.  That got us in the door, but did little else.  We were perfectionists, our instrumental arrangements were complex, we didn’t own the right gear to create the record we wanted yet. A few thousand dollars and 2 years later, we had our first record.  Rich taught us a lot, and was fun to spend time with.  We became pretty close and remain so today.   He gave us some good advice, normally intermingled with some band humor.

“A lot of guys make their first record and just sit back and wait for the limos to show up.  Don’t be those guys.  Keep writing. Keep releasing music. Keep playing shows.”

Another one that applies to basically everything in life goes as follows:

“You can have it cheap, you can have it fast, you can have it done well.  But you can only pick two of those.”

We chose to have it cheap and to have it done well, therefore it took what seemed like an eternity to us at the time.  We all spent a tremendous amount of time in the studio with Rich, and he spent even more time mixing and editing before and after our sessions. Finally, in spring of 2014 right as we were nearing completion of the record, Rich left town for awhile. A week turned to two weeks, two weeks into a month, until we didn’t know when the record might be finished.  Luke had spent some time recording bands at Midwest Audio Recording the previous summer, so still had a key.  We decided to go into the studio one morning together, make some final adjustments to the tracks, and bounce out the final masters.  After a few hours, we ripped our .WAV files to CD, shut everything down, locked up the studio, and walked out.  We finally had our record.