Sessions soon began in earnest and on December 26, Dylan followed the day's rehearsals with a preview of his next album; playing just the piano, Dylan ran through his new batch of songs to Stoner, Soles, and Bernstein. Many of these songs had been written that summer at his farm in Minnesota. As rehearsals got under way it became clear that they weren't "picking up where the Rolling Thunder Revue left off," recalls Mansfield. "I brought my steel guitar and I had it in rehearsal and every time I'd go to start unpacking it, Bob would go, 'We don't need that.' All of a sudden the instrument that I played all over the place in the previous band, he didn't want to see it, let alone hear it."