On August 5, recording artist Shaun Groves will release his sophomore album, entitled Twilight. Having just finished the initial recording process for the album, Shaun shares the fears of an artist troubled by the prospect of creating mediocrity in this third installment of a monthly series.

Remember those thin yellow boxes whose tops featured pictures of impressionistically painted kittens, horses, clowns, and, of course—my favorite—the Lord's Supper? Inside each small package was a brush made to shed plastic bristles all over my masterpiece, a strand of plastic paint buckets numbered from one to 10, and a "canvas" printed to the edges with numbers inside a line drawing just waiting to be filled in with matching-numbered watercolor samples.

I'm thinking of those boxes as I approach a big wooden house in downtown Franklin, Tennessee. The house is decorated as though awaiting a Pottery Barn photo crew, and is stocked with enough chips and bottled water to feed one. I walk in with my guitar and a head full of songs, give a few hugs and handshakes to guys I haven't seen since we made the last record, and make myself comfortable on the large leather couch in the darkened control room.

Jim Dineen, walnut lover/nice guy/poster boy/engineer, sits in front of me in his rolling chair, tweaking knobs and faders as he will for the duration of the recording process. He and his assistant David are making the last preparations for the sessions—laying cables, moving mics, and a bunch of other stuff I don't understand. Thank God for Jim and David.

My producer, Monroe Jones, stumbles into the control room from the kitchen of the Bennett House studio complex—not drunk—just really relaxed. He always is—even now, minutes before we try something he and I have never tried before. We are attempting to do more than paint by numbers and stay in the lines that insure approval from all. I've written songs that are less like line drawings and more like faint sketches. It's less obvious what colors should go where, what choices to make, and, so, this time there is far more freedom and far less certainty to this process. For me anyway.

But that's not scary for Monroe. With or without definite boundaries from an artist, he's apt to challenge every expectation, blur any hard lines, and question every have-to. That's why I love him. That and the fact that I'm sitting in a circle at a student model upright piano—Gary Burnett playing electric guitar on my left, Mark Hill on bass across from me, and Dan Needham slamming drums to my right. I'm in a band. Yes!

The band—MY band—and Monroe gather around me at the piano to hear the first song: "Twilight." As I play, I think of every place where my performance is weak, every spot in the tune that I might blow when we roll tape. (There will be no easy way to fix mistakes this time, since everything I play will be heard by everyone else's microphones as well. That's the downside to setting up this way and not in separate rooms as usual.) While I fret, the guys write. They scribble, in Nashvillian shorthand, every chord and rest they hear while Dan stares at the floor—hearing everything he'll soon play in his head. I finish "Twilight," and there are no questions about anything they just heard. These guys are amazing.

Monroe gives a few instructions on tempo and feel and guitar sounds, and the players go to work making the necessary adjustments to their gear—cracking jokes on each other and me as if to say, in a testosterone-filled, I'm-no-sissy way, "I've missed you too, man."

After everything's set and it seems we're ready to begin recording, Monroe asks me to pray. But before I do I have to say something: "First I want to thank you guys for lending your time and talents to this record. Dan, Mark, you guys were on the last record, and I can't thank you enough for that. Gary, you're new to this little family. Thanks. I don't know what your thoughts are when you play on a record, but I want you to be free. I want us to forget about retailers and radio guys and just make music that fits the songs. I believe in these songs, and I just want each one to get the best treatment possible. I don't want it to sound like anything else, so if we find ourselves drifting into Sheryl Crow or Matchbox 20, we need to stop that. This is not about following the formula. It's about feelings. It's music. I want to make music without computers and vocal tuners and all the slickness that defines "pop" right now. So do what you think is best, and forget everybody else. Alright, let's pray."

And I did.

From then on the chords and melody of each song served as the rough outline, the "tape" as our canvas, and each of us as the artists. Guided by Monroe, enabled by Jim, we laid color after color in place. Every hue complementing the other. I wondered about some combinations—this color on that one won't work. And each time I was wrong. It's beautiful. Some mixtures I'd heard too many times. They were replaced by something more unique. At the end of each day I went home happy, knowing each song was painted with heart, passion, creativity. Nothing was done because it's always done that way. Nothing was run through a perfecting computer. We made honest music—four guys sitting in a room together playing their own instruments and loving it.

Back to those thin yellow boxes. When Monroe was a kid, he probably hated them: only 10 colors, cheap brushes, and too many lines on that canvas. No freedom. No heart. So when I show up to make a record I let him, for the most part, paint what he wants where he wants. We try to please ourselves first and worry about the rest of world another day—or maybe never. We're musicians not accountants.

And we made this record in a big house not a little box.

Click here to listen to an exclusive one-minute demo of Shaun's new song, "Twilight."

Stay tuned for part four of this series in late-May. In the meantime, you can read more about Shaun Groves by visiting our artist page for him, where you'll find previous installments in his "Process" series. Click here to read our review of Invitation to Eavesdrop, and pick up your own copy of it at Musicforce.com.

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