Ghosts, One For The Team's third album, will be released on Afternoon Records on March 16, 2010. The disc is the greatly anticipated follow-up to the Minneapolis quartet's critically acclaimed Build It Up, which came out in August of 2008 and attracted attention from NPR, MTV, Daytrotter, and even Gossip Girl. Ghosts was recorded in San Francisco at John Vanderslice's Tiny Telephone Studios in August and produced by singer/guitarist Ian Anderson, who made the decision to record the disc on tape.
"Recording to tape was really important to me for how the record turned out in general, Anderson says. "Nowadays you can make everything perfect during the recording process, but you can't do that on tape. The way it is is the way it is and that was really important to us as a band. A lot of the record was also done live. The sound of the tape is really warm, you can really hear the room more. There's a sense of breathing in and out."
The palpable life force in the record's sonic elements is mirrored in Anderson's lyrics, which tell an overarching story. Due to the time constraints of a European tour and the time the band had already booked in Tiny Telephone, Anderson wrote and demoed all ten songs in five weeks. The result is a collection of ten songs that interact with one another, crafting a layered narrative.
"There's a cohesive story line in all ten songs and I don't think I would have pulled that off if I'd done it over several months," Anderson says. "That thread exists because they were all there growing together at the same time. They all make sense together. This sounds weird, but I wanted to ask the question 'What would it be like if I became friends with a ghost?' How would we interact and talk? How could I help him move on to the next phase of life? Ultimately, it reflected what was going in my real life-getting out of a serious relationship and dealing with that transition and being okay with moving forward and rebuilding my life from what was leftover."
"I've Been Here So Long," the record's opening number, acts an overture, setting the tone for the entire disc with both its intricate instrumentation and the compelling mιlange of Anderson and Fiddler's vocals as they begin explore the indecision of feeling stuck and the confusion of moving on. "I Got Tamed," a hushed, introspective track that features Vanderslice, is what Anderson calls a manifesto for his year, questioning what it means to become an adult when you feel like you haven't grown up at all. The record concludes with "Garden," drawn from the band's recent EP Build A Garden, which was released in April.
"I think fans of our last record who became fans for the surface elements-the guitars, the melodies, the boy-girl harmonies-are going to like this one," Anderson says. "They might like it as a breakup album. That's the mindset of it. But there will be that small percent who dig deeper and get into the cohesive thread. We're getting older and thinking about music more instead of just writing pop songs. I feel like all the records up until this point were part of the maturation process. And now we've gotten here."
One for the Team, which features Anderson, singer/synth player Grace Fiddler, drummer Elliot Manthey and bassist Jacob Huelster, was formed in 2006 by Manthey and Anderson, who also runs the band's label Afternoon Records. They've played over 200 shows since the release of Build It Up, sharing the stage with numerous bands, including Frightened Rabbit, Dressy Bessy, the French Kicks and Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin.
