How to go
Who: The Sailing with Giant Claw and Authors & Audio
Where: Canal Public House, 308 E. First St., Dayton
When: 9 p.m. Saturday
Cost: $5
More info: 937-461-9343 or www.canalpublichouse.com
The members of The Sailing were all teenagers at Kettering’s Fairmont High School in 2002 when the charmingly bombastic, Brit-inspired space rockers released its debut album. More than a decade and one aborted full-length later, Tech Honors (vocals, keyboard), James Webster (guitar, vocals), Michael Kirkland (bass) and Gus Stathes (drums) are releasing the official follow-up, “Anniversary of Spears.”
Three fourths of the band sat down recently at Lucky’s Taproom in Dayton to discuss the exceptional new album, which will be available at The Sailing’s final show at Canal Public House in Dayton on Saturday.
Protracted sessions
Honors: “We started writing the songs for this album in 2007, and we started recording them in late 2008. In 2009, James and I moved to Philadelphia. We had all this stuff recorded, but we were scattered. I moved back home four years later. Michael had moved away, too, and he moved back last summer.”
Stathes: “We did everything ourselves. We’ve been recording in my basement for the most part.”
Honors: “We recorded these songs without any knowledge of how to actually go about recording something digitally. I went to school for recording, and now I’ve come back, and we’re trying to figure out how to salvage everything.”
The finish line
Stathes: “It’s seems like we’ve been working on this forever, so it will be nice to get the album out to people. But true to form, we’ll literally be getting the CDs in the mail the day before the show.”
Honors: “Our first deadline for this was last year, but we’re finally finishing it up.”
Kirkland: “If The Sailing doesn’t set a deadline it will never get done. We gave ourselves a deadline, and then blatantly ignored it for months, and we’re finally finishing it up a couple weeks before the show.”
Capturing an era
Honors: “In a way this was a vanity recording. If people want it, that’s cool, but this one is for us. We’ve been diligent about recording most of the songs we’ve written, but these songs are from the last era of The Sailing. It’s probably our strongest set of material, so it’s a good note to go out on.”
Kirkland: “I’m excited because I can say with confidence this finally embodies what we’ve always wanted The Sailing to sound like. It finally does justice to what we thought we could do all those years but didn’t know how. That’s super-exciting and will be a nice way to close out our nearly 15 years together.”
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