Rocks Off has a short list of hotly anticipated local releases for the upcoming year. Among that list is certainly Buxton's next album, Nothing Here Seems Strange, as well as whatever cooks up in Robert Ellis' kitchen. We're also looking forward to the new stuff from The Ton Tons and more, including The Cutters, The Busy Kids, The Mahas, Grandfather Child and Frank Freeman.

Roky Moon & BOLT's American Honey resides high on that list as well. The band recorded it in a marathon tracking session at Houston's famous SugarHill Studios Monday, with production work starting around 2 p.m. Drummer Jeoaf Johnson sent Rocks Off a text just before 10 p.m, alerting us that Honey was in the jar. We were lucky enough to be invited to drop in on the sessions.

For producer Dan Workman, the process was "like a dream come true - I've been wanting to record like this for a while, but I couldn't talk anybody into wanting to do this for about five years.

"With the stuff that we've learned from Live From SugarHill, Chris [Longwood] felt confident; I felt confident," Workman says. "When we started to look at Roky Moon to bring into the [Zenhill] record label, we thought 'This is a band that could do this.' I was really afraid that I'd have to sell them hard on it, that it'd be too scary... but they were like 'We've been wanting to do this forever!'"

Workman says up until now he hadn't found a band brave enough to do an entire album in a one-day session. While that may seem unlikely, keep in mind that recording everything in one day means that throughout the session, the band has to nail down each piece of the record at least once.

"It puts the focus back on the music and the musicians, instead of being so precious about being in the recording studio," Workman says. "In some ways, making these incredible studio records in the '60s and '70s kinda set us off on this course where everybody had to experiment, everybody had to use the studio as a tool."

So Roky Moon & BOLT came in and recorded the album live in the studio. In fact, the band recorded the album four times; whipping through the entire set of songs in four straight takes. Zenfilm, which also films Live From SugarHill series as well, was on hand to document the recording process.