A lot of things can happen when a spouse leaves town for a couple of weeks, and few of them tend to end up in the good column. When that situation arose for Matt Hebert—veteran of local stalwarts like Haunt and Ware River Club—he decided to do something productive and positive: write and record an album. Hebert acted upon a much talked-about collaboration with friend Mike Wyzik, member of numerous projects, including Ghosts of Blake, Red Door Exchange and Storm The Ohio, and Scary Beard was born.

"I was living with Matt last winter," recalls Wyzik. "[Matt's wife] Sam was away working on the Superbowl, so we decided to write and record a record in the two weeks she was gone. I had a 707 drum machine, Korg Microsynth, a Juno synth in storage so I dug those up. Matt brought some stuff and we hunkered down and just started creating. The next thing you know, we had the skeleton of a record."

The process was an exercise in joint songwriting, and featured a good many guests roaming in and out of the proceedings. "Matt would lay down a bass line and then I would come up with a guitar line and then we'd put a drum machine behind it," Wyzik says.

"The Roland 707 drum machine is really the heart of the record," adds Hebert. "Just about everything started with a beat. Some songs were first passes of a chord progression over a beat that Mike, myself or Chris Couchon wrote. We got about eight things really quick and brought in Thane Thomsen and Dave Houghton to write lyrics with Mike and I. Really fun lyric-writing sessions around the kitchen table developed a sort of end-of-days theme."

Wyzik says the days were not filled exclusively with work. "We had a good time. We had a mountain of Miller High Life cans by the end. We could have paid for the thing with the returns."

The duo took the raw product to friend and music savant Matt Cullen, who preserved the feel and spirit of the tracks. "We had 75 percent done, then took it to Hebert's studio and Matty Cullen spearheaded the mixing and played on some songs along with Mark Schwaber," says Wyzik. "Matt was a huge part of the process and helped maintain its lo-fi-ness. We were thinking about mixing and mastering, but part of its charm was how rough around the edges it was and how raw and natural sounding it ended up. He mixed it in two days. We didn't want to labor and obsess over it, but we did do some overdubs and backing vocals with Bob Hennessy, Melissa Nelson—but it was a pretty quick thing."

Despite Hebert's move to Austin, Scary Beard plans to persevere. "I hope to get back to New England in the spring, when we have hard copies, and do a show," Hebert says. "We were talking about making another Scary Beard record at some point. Maybe this time we'll do it all through emails."

The duo is just happy that they were able to pull the challenge off. "We got it done in time and are all pretty proud of it," says Hebert. "I think one of the cool things about the record is that we took chances that maybe we wouldn't take with our own name on it."

Wyzik performs with Ghosts of Blake Saturday, Feb. 27 at the Brass Cat in Easthampton. Visit www.myspace.com/scarybeardhairybeard for more.