Notes & Credits

Belladonna is (in alphabetical order):
Matt Brauer: electric guitar, acoustic guitar on "After Fires & Earthquakes", keyboard on "National Snowman Burning Day"
Nate Brown: bass guitar
Dan Couture: drums
Ian Kells: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, vocals

This album was primarily recorded live in Dan's attic ("The Loft"). There are no guitar overdubs, nor bass or drums, though there are, admittedly, a few edits that were made to prevent small mistakes from ruining an otherwise perfect live take. These edits were kept to an absolute minimum. Because of this, and in spite of the fact that I just used the word "perfect" to describe the takes, you may hear a few small mistakes here and there; these were left in intentionally to preserve the "live quality" of the recording. That's the fancy answer, at least; a much more realistic reason is that we had time constraints, limited equipment, and, besides, we screw up sometimes. Vocals and keyboard were added later in the den by the computer in my house; the noise at the beginning of "No Pockets" and the entire "After Fires & Earthquakes" track were also done at that time. All of this took place between December 28th, 2007 and January 4th, 2008, with additional mixing on January 21st.

Produced by Matt Brauer with Belladonna.
Engineered, recorded, and mixed by Matt Brauer.
All instruments on tracks 1-8 were recorded live in The Loft between the 27th and 29th of December, 2007, except for vocals, keyboard, and the introductory noise on track 1, as well as tracks 9 & 10. These were recorded January 3rd and 4th, 2008.

I need to thank my brother Ethan for letting us use a lot of his equipment, without which this would have been completely impossible.

Our good friend Nick Beyer drew the picture which appears on the cover and I digitally edited the colors.

A note on the writing process:
We like to jam a lot. Many of our songs include a lot of improvisation or elements that change from show to show and evolve over time. Because of this, it is sort of hard to pinpoint exactly who wrote any specific song, even though for each one there was a specific band member who introduced it. So, in crediting the songwriting, I listed the name of the person who brought in the main elements and then, if the song was developed by the band as a whole, I added "& Belladonna". I don't thinnk it would be fair to say that any one person wrote the entire song; none of us would claim at all to have written Dan's drum parts, to say the least.

Below are the lyrics for each song as well as my own notes on the writing and recording process.

- Matt Brauer