COME IN AND BURN

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In my opinion, in purely aural terms, this is probably the best sounding Rollins Band album. Steve Thompson produced and Clif Norrell engineered. we also had the pleasure of a bit of preproduction with Bob Ezrin. The basics were all done up in the big room at Bearsville and the overdubs were done in Manhattan at Sorcerer. It's pretty huge sounding but, with hindsight, we probably spent far too long in the runup to making it. I love the songs but they're somewhat overwritten. Every "i" is dotted and every "t" is crossed partially because it took so long to get to make it. We were writing and rehearsing every day for months over at the old Context Studios on Avenue A in New York. I still love this record but feel it was a bit smothered by being worked on TOO much. Kind of like how a kid who gets everything he wants an is constantly smothered with attention gets spoiled. Overall the biggest thing it has working against it is that the songs, while great, weren't really written to Henry's strengths so he was having a hard time finding a way to come up with words for some of them. Perversely, it was a rough time in a lot of ways because some things had gotten too easy. The other thing that would really have helped strip it back down would have been to tour on the songs BEFORE the album was made but hey, it is what it is. My favorite tracks are Neon (with a deliberate solo nod to Mahavishnu John at the end) and Shame. Then there's the one that got away...its working title was "Stax" it's Melvin's and my favorite but didn't have a handhold for Henry so it stayed an unfinished instrumental.
GEAR: In terms of guitars doing the basics it was pretty much the three main PRS's (the black one, the white one and the McCarty) with a bit of 12 string strat. I mostly used my regular boogie Dual Rectifiers up at Bearsville though we did experiment with some littler amps too. For overdubs at Sorcerer we set up pretty much all the amps we could find. It was loud.
Curiously (or perhaps not), the one thing that Clif Norrell ending up using in pretty much every track was the DI out from my PRS 2 x 12 combo. Steve Thompson, the producer, paid me a pretty high complement by pretty much leaving me to arrange voicings and do the guitar layerings myself. He was really taken with the built-in fuzz on the Longhorn so that got used a lot.
I mostly tracked inside the control room where it's more like playing along with my stereo.

DISC 1::
1. Shame
2. Starve
3. All I Want
4. End Of Something, The
5. On My Way To The Cage
6. Thursday Afternoon
7. Also Ran
8. During A City
9. Neon
10. Threshold
11. Spilling Over The Side

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