People sometimes ask us "If Kim lives in Texas, and Milo lives in England, then how do you do music together?" For a behind the scenes account of how these things work, below is Milo's description of the recording of the song Drowning.

"Although there are lots of small variations from song to song, Drowning is probably fairly typical of how we do things. I'd written the basic song, and put together a vocal demo in my studio (with my own horrible singing!) - I'm based around a PC running Cakewalk, but with some outboard gear too. This was just a rough track with MIDI drums and keyboard and the main guitar figure. From this, I made an MP3 file to send to Kim. Kim always gets an initial demo of anything I write, partly to see if she likes it or not, and partly as a key-check to make sure that it's in a comfortable key for her to sing. I know her range pretty well now, so we usually get the key right pretty early on. My initial demo of Drowning was in A minor, but we quickly moved it into D minor for that reason. Kim will also sometimes pitch arrangement ideas at this stage.

So, having decided that we wanted to record the song, and decided on an arrangement, I put together a full-blown backing track. There is often a gap here - we don't usually record songs as soon as they're written and demoed, at least in part because of lack of time and other commitments on both sides. This has the benefit that we're never short of something to work on - we always have songs "in the cupboard". In the case of Drowning, the demo was done at the end of June 2001, but we didn't start work on the song "proper" until early December. Anyway, the main guitar figure was re-recorded in the right key, and "real" bass guitar added - tuned down a whole-step to give a bottom D to suit the new key. More MIDI keyboards, guitar powerchords and 12-string acoustic. The lead solos probably went on at this stage too. That little lot was rough-mixed, converted to MP3, and sent to Texas.

Kim loads the backing track from her PC onto the Roland multitracker in her studio, and then records her lead vocals and harmonies onto separate tracks. She usually revamps the melody lines and tweaks the lyrics as she does this, as she finds out how the song sounds, and she always finds her own harmony lines. On Drowning, she didn't play acoustic guitar, but on the occasions when she does, this goes down onto a separate stereo pair on the Roland. When she's happy, she transfers the recorded vocals, in isolation and "dry" back to the PC, converts them to high-bitrate MP3 and sends them back to me.

Once I have her vocals back in England, I import them into my existing multitrack and get them in-time with the song, usually by ear. Then I go into "producer mode" and start to fiddle with what I have. Kim's vocals never need much - a dab of reverb and maybe a little EQ. She uses a compressor when she records, but I sometimes add a little more. Other "producerly" touches will creep in at this stage - on Drowning, the water noises and the ghost voice at the end were added. I'll sometimes re-record or add guitar parts, and the MIDI programming gets a good tweaking. That all gets mixed and mastered to a "first master", which is again converted to MP3 and sent to Texas. Kim will listen to this several times, and come back with any comments or suggestions she has. We'll bat mixes back and forth across the Atlantic until we're both happy with the result, at which point we have a new song."