1995. "Chris suggested that rather than book a hotel for six months, it'd be cooler if we rented a house for everyone to stay in," Rich Robinson noted in 1996. "So Chris moved into the house, and I brought my little board over to work on the demos. It sounded so cool that I brought my big board over, and the rest of my shit, and we rented a Neve sidecar for 10 extra channels. And we just did it." Writing and production As pre-production for Three Snakes and One Charm began, several songs were written with Chris and Rich Robinson on different sides of the United States. Rich would write and record music in Atlanta, GA and send his results to Chris in Los Angeles, CA. "The long-distance writing was just something we did to get the process more concrete," Rich told Acoustic Guitar magazine in 1996. "I had a lot of bits and pieces that I'd written on tour and I needed to hear what Chris would do with them." Once the basic ideas were recorded to tape, the band assembled in the house in Atlanta, GA (dubbed Chateau de la Crowe by the band) to begin the Three Snakes sessions. Then-keyboardist Eddie Harsch recalls: ""When we got to Atlanta, Chris and Rich put us in a room and played us the demos. The record was basically written. Twelve songs with vocals, dogs barking in the background, everything. We just looked at each other, like, 'What do you want us to do? It's all here." There proved to be a great deal more to do, with the band spending several weeks refining their original demos. Plus, a few other songs were written on the spot, including "Under a Mountain" and "Better When You're Not Alone." In total, the band recorded twenty-six songs during the sessions. It was during the recording of Three Snakes that the band decided to introduce new elements into the music, the most noticeable being a horn section on "(Only) Halfway to Everywhere" and "Let Me Share The Ride." "That was the Dirty Dozen Brass Band," Rich commented in 1996. "They opened for us last year (1995) through the whole American leg of (our) tour. Chris just said, 'Fuck it. We've never had horns that we like. Let's go for it.'" The band attributed the sonic textures of Three Snakes to the nuances of recording