14 songs actually 15 in 14 days recorded in 15 months for $14. Four score and seven years ago our forefathers foretold that Fortnight was fortified with forty-proof forkin' rock and roll. Fortastic!
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Not to be outdone by mercurial megastar and peer, W. Axl Rose, Weathers proclaimed through his oracles shortly after the completion of Free Horse Manure that he had entered a prolonged period of rumination during which he would shift his focus from writing and recording songs to the infinitely-more-challenging thinking about writing and recording songs. "I've pretty much fully explored the action-oriented side of my inner artist, but what about the immovable object of my next album? How better to get in tune with this abstraction than by doing nothing?"
Enter the irresistible force of UFO Catcher bandmate Vaunne Weathers.
"I told him he needed to stop moping and do something besides watch TV."
And so the seed was planted by the master gardener. Mrs. Weathers elaborates, "This year, I decided to grow some plants from seed, but now they're mostly dead because they got too hot." As they say, if you can't take the heat.... "Freakin' seeds!"
"My eyes were pried open by the seed incident," says Cody, "Or else it was that we stopped getting cable, but anyway, somehow I was tuned into the whole fragility of life, and also I somehow believed that Guns N'Roses had finally --suddenly-- released Chinese Democracy, but then it turned out to be just a rumor, or maybe they did release an album; I'm not sure, but if you suggest I look it up on the internet, you can just keep on truckin' because I won't do that. So I was kind of in this odd imbalanced state, wondering if my sympathetic non-writing period could end, and that's when I got this idea that I would write 14 songs in 14 days."
"So I did it. Except I didn't count very carefully and ended up writing 15 songs in 15 days, which I only discovered later when I sat down to record the songs, and I was writing them down in my PeeChee, and I was making little marks after every five songs and I was like, 'Hey.... wait a minute, that's not right.... oh man!"
Adds Vaunne, "Freakin' typical."
And so Fortnight came into being. 14 songs written in 14 days plus one more song written the next day after that. This album represents a return to roots for the Checkmate braintrust and is easily their best album in at least a year, proving that when the chickens come home to roost, the chickens rock. Rock on, chickens.
