2020. Isolation.

The year had started with so much promise. We ended 2019 by playing the "Pure Fear" album release show at The Blue Lamp. Tour plans for the summer of 2020 to promote "Pure Fear" were starting to fall into place (including a run of shows with our old friends BOAT). We were also still writing new material ("Seed", "Crossguns" and the main riff for "Yow Man" were actively being worked on). The idea was to play as many dates as possible through the summer, debut any new material we had, and then record again before Andrew had to leave for school in the Fall.

Then Covid hit. We unknowingly rehearsed the last time for a number of months in early March 2020. All live dates were eventually cancelled and we did not get back together in the same room until late June.

No longer knowing what we should do (did anyone?), we just continued working on new material. During this time, Andrew was also informed that his school would be conducted remotely for the semester, so he stayed in Sacramento. We decided that we should finally make EP III. We continued writing throughout the summer and ended up with 6 songs. We also decided that we should finally record our cover of "The 15th" in the studio (see the "Ceremonies..." compilation). These demo sessions also produced a demo of "Ziggy Stardust" which we had been messing around with for a while (again, see "Ceremonies"). A proper session was booked with Pat Hills at Earth Tone for September 2020. Appropriate for the time, this session was recorded entirely masked.

For the first time in the history of Grave Lake, all of the songs have the distinction/disadvantage of having never been preformed live prior to recording. The vocal melodies traditionally had the benefit of being fine-tuned over months of being preformed live before recording. These songs did not have that benefit, so you can very distinctly hear them change from demo to demo. In hindsight, I really like where "Crossguns" and "Yow Man" started out. But at the time, they were really haunting me. I couldn't sleep and needed them to be different, so some minor and very drastic changes were made between the first two demo sessions. Although she does not appear on these demos, Stephine once again returned to play keys on the actual versions of "Crossguns" and "Seed".

The "man" titles of the demos also continue the long standing practice of having working titles that describe the song. "Yow Man" was our attempt to at least musically write something that sounded like The Jesus Lizard. "Martsch Man" was titled as such because we thought it sounded like Built to Spill. Andrew had recently watched the documentary "Jaco", and while there is no actual connection between "Pastorius Man" and the late, great, Jaco Pastorius, the song is rather complex rhythmically for a Grave Lake song. Something we would start to explore with more frequency...

Ian (September 2022)