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Push to Publish

Last week’s gig at Bands on the Bricks was a great opportunity for Zen Mustache. We saw a chance to get our sound in front of a lot of people, and a diverse group at that. To prepare, we not only wanted to tighten up our set and put forth our best performance, we also wanted to have some physical handouts that people could take with them and hopefully remember us.

To that end we spent a great deal of energy over the summer getting recordings in place for a short 5-song EP, which we titled Midday Buzz. A lot of long nights, especially from Justin (our drummer) in his recording studio. But we were very happy with the final product on three newly minted songs: The Valley, Left Work Early, and Awakening. The other two songs, Hey Jane and Whiskey, Wind & Wheat, had been recorded previously.

The truth is we pushed the envelope trying to get CD’s ready in time for the show at Bands on the Bricks. We were still recording tracks less than a week before, and Justin was mixing all the way until Tuesday night (the day before!) That Tuesday night we had a CD burning party – burning 100 CD’s while doing an acoustic rehearsal in prep for Wednesday’s show. At time things got a little silly, and usually that was Phil’s doing.http://www.zenmustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/PhilsBall.jpg

But the CD’s weren’t the only project. In addition we created stickers with the ZM logo and on the back of 250 stickers we printed download codes for people to go grab our music online at our bandcamp website.

Overall the experience was a bit like pulling together a term project in college – a team of people, each with different skills, a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to accomplish, and a deadline. And it came right down to the deadline, too, with Kyle and Emily manually stamping the CD covers just an hour before we went on stage! We definitely set ourselves up for several long nights for the band, but it was worth it. In the end I was impressed with the way everyone came through and I was personally proud of what we accomplished. I can’t think of a better cast of characters I’d rather work on a project like this than the ZM gang. Great work you guys – thanks for everything!

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