Writing
As touring continued, the band began writing again with Duncan. One of the first songs they wrote was the eventual concert favorite "Trapeze", which they played live along with two other newly written songs "Home" and "Disgusted". "Disgusted" would evolve into "Spider Gun" and eventually became the track "Big Dumb Rocket". In December 1996 the band began intensive writing and demoing sessions in a rented rehearsal space. Despite coming up with several new ideas, the band found that writing while on tour was very difficult because they couldn't give the songs their undivided attention and most of their early ideas were scrapped because the band wasn't satisfied with them. "Trapeze" would make it to recording but the track was eventually cut and has yet to be released.
Pre-production for the album was set to begin in January 1996. Producer Arnold Lanni noticed the band's discontent with the songs they were writing. "I went down to see them and knew it wasn't happening," he recalled. "All their friends and family were calling them up. You sell that many records, you're on everybody's A-list, everybody blows sunshine up your butt and sometimes you believe the hype. We had to pull the plug on that scenario." At Lanni's suggestion, the band and him traveled to Duncan's rural lakeside cottage near Muskoka, Ontario in order to concentrate on writing and recording demos for the album without distractions from family, friends or the media. While there, the band lived together in the cottage surrounded by instruments. A tape recorder was left on in the house all day to pick up any ideas being played. Lanni and the band members would usually play ice hockey in the afternoon and collaborate on songs in the evening and into the night. By the end of their stay, around 20 songs had been written. When they returned to the Toronto studio in February, according to Mike Turner, "When we came back to record, it just came together".
Read more about this topic: Clumsy (Our Lady Peace Album)
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