These were the last two songs on the 1976 album.  The decision to overlap them using the technology we had required the use of three reel-to-reel tape decks, at least one of which was not in the best of shape.

In 2001, I was able digitally overlap the songs from first generation tapes, but in the interest of “purity” I decided against using any equalization.

But they really needed it.  I suspect the tape echo that we used - and possibly speakers being on in the room at the time - caused the sound to resonate in the middle of the spectrum.  A little fun with digital filters, some normalization and voilá, the best it’s ever sounded. 

Cute story about Grey Morning.  Towards the end of August and the start of classes in Ann Arbor for me (Michigan State was on a later schedule) we scrambled to try to finish the album we’d been working on all summer, writing songs and recording whenever we could. 

All three of us managed to get the same day off and got off to a quick start that morning.  We laid down a version or two of Grey Morning with piano, flute and guitar first thing, then spent the rest of the day, with breaks for meals, working on recording all the songs we had written but not yet recorded to our satisfaction.   We finished up around 2:00 AM by doing one of the few overdubs on the album.  John and I played string synthesizer and guitar against the earlier version of Grey Morning recorded first thing that morning.

We were exhausted.  We hopped in a car, probably Dan’s Gremlin, and headed to Tin Lizzy for a beer. Too late, it was after 2:30; no beer that night.  We were a bit disappointed, but got something to eat and as I recall, we were pretty happy; confident we gotten done what we planned to.

-Johnny