The songs began from an idea to strip down the sound to four musicians and acoustic guitars, keeping more traditional song structures with lyrics. Many of the songs were originally recorded as two acoustic guitars, bass, and drums played with brushes, some songs featuring three or four acoustic guitars, but representing no more than four individual parts at a time (i.e. no more than four musicians could handle in a live-ish fashion).Once a handful of songs were recorded in this manner, the idea arose about how these songs would sound if passed to a more urban producer, and what would he or she do with them. A few songs were experimented with in this manner, and once the experiments turned out appealing, the band abandoned the idea of limiting itself to brushed drums and hand percussion, and also the idea of limiting to four musical parts. However, the decision to record only with acoustic guitars remained.As part of the"urbanization," a conscious decision was made to reuse certain elements across songs such as samples of claps, tambourines, and other percussion, not only to enhance the cohesiveness of the collection, but also to spark new creative thought. In some cases, these elements were added, new elements built on them, and original elements dropped. The idea of keeping the recording limited to acoustic guitars, bass, and percussion still does just that. No electric guitars or keyboard synths are used in the recording.