Tonight I’ll be back over at TB’s. Apparently we’re re-recording a track called I Am because there’s something hideously wrong with it, something so insidious and evil that I FAILED TO NOTICE IT AT ALL WHEN I RECORDED BACK-UP VOCALS ON IT THE WEEK BEFORE LAST. What this means is that the CD master has NOT gone to Iowa City and is NOT being pressed as I type.

What it means is that J’s album project is way the hell behind schedule. (Which doesn’t really matter, in the long run. I just like to complain.)

Anyway, tonight we’re re-recording an entire song. I will probably not get home until after midnight. Tomorrow we’ll be rehearsing in the afternoon – the entire band, together, for the very first time – and gigging at night.

And while I’m singing “religious music” (to quote my dad), he and Bread will be eating dead deep-fried chickens at the Mt. Hammil Tap in honor of Chuckie’s birthday. (My father doesn’t even know Chuckie, that’s how much he loves those fried chickens!)

I’m just glad I don’t have to go to Mt. Hammil again. A girl can only have cocktails and a salad bar for dinner so often.

I managed to underdress rather spectacularly today, don’t know what I was thinking. I’ve got a long-sleeved top on, but Birks with no socks. It’s raining and overcast and cold out. I had to bring a sweater in from the Jeep to wrap my feet up in under my desk.

I went to J’s house today at 12:30 for a band photo. It’ll run in the Fairfield Weekly Reader on Thursday to announce our gig at Cafe Paradiso this Saturday. (Yes, I’m playing a coffee shop. I mean, it’s appropriate for the material – ain’t no loud blues gig, this.) I guess we’re rehearsing Thursday night. The whole band has literally never played together before; I met the violinist for the first time today.

J still wants to re-record one of the songs, and is bordering on miserable that an album recorded for less than a grand has flaws on it. He seems particularly depressed with his own singing, which is More. Than. Perfectly. Adequate. He mentioned something about wishing this project measured up to what it would be if he’d spent four months and twenty-five thousand dollars on it! G told him to revise his standards downward from ‘perfect’ to something more mundane like merely ‘excellent,’ and K told him that even bands who can afford multi-tracking often choose to record live in the studio, sacrificing the ability to punch in for the synergy of actually playing together. I told J he’s totally vata-deranged.

So I’ll be doing my first bona fide roo gig on Saturday: singing Western bhajans in a smoke-free, booze-free coffee shop. My God, I’ve turned into TSR!

I’m actually excited; it’ll be fun. But one must endeavor to engage in a healthy amount of self-mockery, eh?

Local jargon file is here.

I’m so proud of Steven! (Er, Derby.) I adore this song. It needs about half a million dollars worth of production, of course, but if it had that it would basically be a hit. It’s so fun to have your friends on your iPod. Seriously. Dude.
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Recording is finished!

For me, at least. I think they’ll still be laying down additional tracks (guitar solos, mandolin, flute, violin, etc.) and finishing production & mixing until Wednesday. Next Friday we’re meeting at TB’s for a pizza-slash-listening party. After that I have no idea how long it will be until I actually get a copy. I’m gonna get J to let me put a couple tracks up on my site, hopefully in their entirety.

J & Snow want me to come to Aspen, CO in May to perform the material for Sai Ma, but I have no idea if that’ll work out – I’m willing to go, of course, but airfare from CR to Aspen is probably prohibitively expensive, and landing in Denver would do me no good since it’s so far from Aspen and I ain’t takin’ no damn Grayhound bus up a mountain.

Sunday, the last day of recording for me, was a bhajan-style song… names of the Divine Mother (Lakshmi, Durga, Kali, etc.) in call-and-response format. J invited several additional background singers from his satsang group to make it sound fuller, so I was basically nothing more than a choir member. We spent literally HOURS punching in – about two thirds of the way through the song – to get a tricky tempo change nailed; we could have re-recorded the entire track about five times in the time it took them to nail the punch (*insert the heavy sigh of the eternally-beleagured-vocalist-who-waits-on-musicians HERE*). After we finally got it right, we did another track of response vocals, then we listened to it and I was finished with my part of this project.

I think I’m vaguely bummed it’s over, actually. I haven’t sung in so long. Maybe Snow and K and I really should start a band and do late 70’s/early 80’s covers; we’re all from the same planet and would have an absurd amount of fun. Or, as K said, “Fuck that! Let’s write originals!”

Anyway, after we finally finished recording I gave K a ride home. (MY GOD I LOVE K AND A. WHY DON’T I HANG OUT WITH THEM?!) (I see them once a year at Amma, and they live right smack dab in Fairfield; it’s not like it’s hard to find them fer chrissakes.) A was home so I went in and ended up spending a lovely fun hour there. (MY GOD I LOVE K AND A. WHY DON’T I HANG OUT WITH THEM?!) We talked about music and concerts and listened to CDs. I got to hear Walter Becker’s [song] “Book Of Liars” for the first time since I lost my cassette six years ago. They made me listen to some tracks off of the latest Duran Duran album. And K burned me a copy of Steven’s album ‘Let Me In’.

Steven! Is recording albums in his bedroom! In New York! How cute is that?! Actually, I guess his name’s Derby now, but either way – I sang with him when he was Steven – the album’s got some really nice moments on it. The first three tracks are solid, at any rate. I’m SO brutally amused. Steven (er, Derby) actually called when I was there – about five minutes after we started talking about him – so I got to say hi to him for the first time in about a decade. He sounds like he’s doing really well. A says she talks to him practically daily. Who knew?

A caught me up on the whole Steven/Ilana-Barbara/Katya/etc. crew; it was great to hear about everybody. Barbara STILL wants to record the a capella group (twelve years later!) and is threatening to get us (me and A) to NYC this August or so to actually accomplish it. I told Derby I’d record with him while I’m there if there’s time. HOW FUN WOULD THAT FUCKING BE?

Very. That’s the answer: VERY. FUCKING. FUN.

Anyway, go to Derby’s site and download some smooth tracks. Some of it’s pretty tasty, you might dig it!

This probably won’t make you laugh – it was something of a location joke (i.e. “you had to be there”) – but I nearly wet myself:

Last night, recording. We were in between takes. I’d been giving J grief about his love of reverb – he’s so used to hearing reverb on his voice that he’s bummed without it, and I HATE REVERB. (TB told me that’s unusual in a singer, but I don’t own any gear so I can’t HIDE MY FLAWS WITH REVERB.) (Reverb is for pussies and guitar players. I am so serious.)

Anyway, we were in between takes. It was quiet. I was sitting on the floor, K was nearby. TB was tweaking stuff on the laptop across the room. Recording gear was everywhere – instruments, thermoses of tea, wires, cables, mics, scores, notes, shaker eggs.

In the utter quiet, I muttered: “I hate reverb.”

K replied: “I hate compression.”

And then TB, from the console, as if queued: “I hate you.”

It became a little schtick: ‘I hate reverb I hate compression I hate you’, ‘I hate reverb I hate compression I hate you’, ‘I hate reverb I hate compression I hate you’.

Seriously – that shit was so funny!

No? Hmm. Guess ya hadda be there. 😉

Session number two at TB’s house last night went from six to 10:45. We got two songs in the can… even though you can’t really say “in the can” any more, since no one uses tape – it all goes straight onto a hard drive. But still, we recorded Om Namah Shivaya Om and Glory Glory, and I think they came out well. I’d like to lay down about eight (or ten) (or twelve) more vocal tracks on Om Namah Shivaya Om because the changes are awesome, but I doubt I’ll get to.

We hit the pocket much sooner last night than the night before, and the vibe in general was pretty good. We had good fun joking around, too – this group of folk is really sweet. I mean, they’re amazingly sweet, to themselves and each other, and the space is really gentle; I almost feel awkward around such subtle people because my sense of humor is so very base… but I’m the funny chick. I can’t help it. Sometimes there’s a conflict between people’s idea of ‘spiritual’ and my sense of humor but I simply fail to see it. If you’re laughing, it’s all good. (Well, as long as its not at the expense of someone’s heart.) I have a hard time being quiet when there’s an opportunity for a joke, and I simply like to hear people giggle.

J put new strings on his guitar the day before yesterday (a recording no-no, because strings take awhile to stretch out) and he had a hell of a time keeping his instrument in tune last night. About the fifth time he stopped to tune his B string, he said, “This B just won’t stay in tune.” And I said, ‘You should just take it off.” TB laughed and told me I’m a nut.

TB, if you don’t know about him, is a well-known Irish music expert. He plays all kinds of things, flutes and bagpipes and I think some stringed instrument of some kind. He also a master pipe maker. He can be observed wearing kilts around town. He’s toured pretty extensively, and is, in a nutshell, A Monster Player. He’s also a great recording engineer, who gives impeccable but never hurtful advice. (He can tell you you’re flat without your ego noticing, which is an incredibly difficult thing to manage.) He will happily be a human metronome for the duration of a nine-minute song. His patience is endless.

J dropped briefly into a rut last night on the first verse of Glory Glory, which is many many bars of just him, alone, on guitar and voice. For about ten takes, he either sang sharp or flat, or did something wonky on his guitar. He started to feel tense about it – who wouldn’t! – until finally TB told us all that this always happens at some point during recording, and then related a brief story about what recording hell really is: five hours, playing the same four bars over and over and OVER AND OVER, take eighty-seven. Gack. So to break the funk, Snow and J did some breathing exercise together (I don’t know what discipline it was, some pranic thing) and when we were ready to record again J looked up at me with those big brown eyes and I said, “Did you feel that? Just now? THAT was us beginning to rock. Before was PR – pre rock. Now we’re AR. Let us rock.” He grinned up at me and said, “Well, all right.” And we did just that.

I once recorded a radio commercial, and for the LIFE OF ME I could not sing in tune that day. It was two hours of agony for me and the recording engineer. I breathed, I drank water, I did yoga, warmed up, I jogged in place, and I could NOT fucking sing in tune. My tone was great, my phrasing was great… I just COULD NOT HEAR PITCH until playback. It was the most painful musical experience of my life. So I had total compassion for J. Seriously.

Not to mention that I don’t really sing in tune myself any more. Snort!

The cute Australian “audient” (singular for audience? hah!) was there again last night, and her name I learned! It’s Virginia, or Ananda Ma. She’s planning on going to school in Boulder next year, after she goes home and makes enough money to come back. She’s friends with the Hickeys and is just a fabulous gal in general. Her accent utterly slays me. So cute. She knows how to shoot guns and drink rum. All my guy friends would eat their hearts out if they met her.

K’s drum work was great; I think last night’s charts were more beat-oriented overall because he played some great stuff. (He’s super cute, too, when you say, “Dude, that thing you did there was hot!” He just smiles slowly, and says “thank you” really softly.)

Snow’s keyboard work was solid as always… he seems to think he kinda sucks on keys but I think I would have NOTICED BY NOW if he actually did suck. I miss having him on guitar of course, because he is your basic California guitar god, but I guess he’ll be adding solos later. I love having keys. It’s nice to be able to hear chords entire, as God intended them, rather than the series of inversions and non-chord ringing strings you always get with folk guitar. Not that I hate guitar, but stuff’s always more locked in for me chordally when I can hear a piano. Plus Snow’s just a tasty player. He’s still working on brightening up his tone vocally, but I don’t know if he’ll be able to. He’s got a smooth, breathy, blending voice by nature – I like it the way it is, but he feels he’s having a hard time blending with J and me. I don’t know that I agree, but I tried to soften my own voice when singing backup with him last night, but I forgot to pay attention during playback to see if I’d succeeded in blending with him better.

J continues to remind me of Cat Stevens vocally. The tunes he writes are totally different, but he’s definitely got a Cat thing going on with the way he sings, and his actual voice is similar. Which I like.

I had some pitch problems in a few spots, and I turned diva and threw a bit of a fit at one point because I didn’t know the song well enough to feel I should be recording it. But they all told me to get over it and go for it, and I did, and over all I feel pretty good about the results. I’m unutterably hard on myself, and cringe every single time I’m even a tiny bit out of tune, or sloppy, or miss an attack… I find my mind divided between the drowsy groovyness of a good experience with the process of recording, and the analytical vivisection of the recording itself. “Wow, that FELT great! But man, I suck!” is a hard dichotomy to sustain, yet somehow I always seem to manage.

We’ll be doing it again tonight. I work ’til six, grab some drive-thru, and get to TB’s by six. On Friday I am SO SLEEPING IN.

Last night I went to TB’s house with J and the rest of the band to record. We didn’t finish until 11:30, and I was so wired afterward that I didn’t get to sleep ’til 12:30. And then Mr. Bread woke me up about nine times during the night.

I am so sleepy this morning.

When Bread finally came up to bed he flashed the overhead light on (I hate when he does that because it always wakes me up), then he woke me up a bunch more times between 4:30 and seven because he’s a cuddle freak who CANNOT HOLD STILL. He likes to move every 15 seconds or so, which drives me nuts. I startle awake when he puts his hand on my hip because I’m ticklish, and then I drift back off, and then he moves again, and I drift back off, and then he moves again… It’s a total pain. I wish I still slept like a corpse; it was so nice back then, sleeping through fire alarms. *sigh*

I’m thinking of trying that amino acid that’s supposed to help you sleep – I need to be able to sleep all night, and Bread’d probably throw a fit if I tried to sleep in another bed most of the time. I just sleep so lightly these days! I hate thirty-something; twenty-something was SO much better.

Anyway: recording. When I got to TB’s house around seven last night he was still setting up; he hadn’t known he’d be hosting the recording until about three hours prior and was busy untangling cords and plugging things in. I sat on the floor for awhile, studying a really strange-looking speaker made out of round tubs and solid state electronics (audiophiles and their crazy speakers!), until J and K showed up, then I waited around doing nothing until finally Snow showed up.
Continue reading Recording Has Begun →

After work yesterday, I drove home and made a huge platter of nachos for dinner, which Brett and I ate – as usual – in front of the TV. (Brett won’t eat at the table, which is why our dining table is pushed against a wall in the kitchen and doesn’t even have chairs in front of it, and serves mainly as a place to put the microwave and pet the cat.)

After dinner I read for awhile, then left for rehearsal. Since I’d left too early, I pulled into the 1-Stop parking lot, parked behind a U-Haul, and warmed up by singing along with my iPod for fifteen minutes. I haven’t fully warmed up vocally in YEARS. Amazing how rusty the instrument can get. I have very little resonance in my head anymore; keeping a warm tone in the sinuses is not really a natural thing to do and takes a lot of, well, practice. Fortunately I have a big ol’ resonant NOSE so my tone’s still warm enough. (Snort!)

At a quarter after seven I pulled up at Jonas’ and went inside. Kevin was playing hand drums but other than that it was just Greg and Jonas as before. We practiced until about twenty after ten, and I had a really good time. Jonas is a leeeeeeeettle bit controlling but not too horribly so, and I’ve worked with Greg before so he makes sense to me musically. By the time we were finished I was more warmed up than I’d been in ages and remembered that I love singing, dammit. There’s a portion of my head range that’s really thin and tinny, and there are still some places between ranges where I don’t have a smooth transition, but hope is not lost. I could be back in vocal shape if I just kept at it. The voice is, after all, just a muscle. Maybe I’ll start taking lessons or something.

We practiced four songs, and I really like two of them. The other two are okay, but since I don’t write myself I rarely spend much energy not liking songs someone’s actually bothered to bring into the world. We spent about twenty minutes jamming on a part of one of the songs with the keyboard’s built-in drum track going and that was a wee bit cheesy, but all in all I had a really great time and am looking forward to hearing the finished project on CD in a couple weeks. Hopefully they’ll let me post a couple MP3s here on goblinbox.com.
Continue reading Sing, Sang, Sung →

Friday morning I went to Jonas’ house and auditioned for him and Greg. They liked me, so now I’m busy for the next three weeks: I’ll be rehearsing Tues-Thurs. nights next week, then recording Tues-Thurs. the next two weeks.

It’ll be a nice little project. Not hugely challanging musically, which is good since I’m totally chopless in my old age. It’ll be interesting to record again after, what, ten years?

I’ve got holes in my range that didn’t used to be there. It’s weird to reach for a note and not have it.

After the audition/rehearsal at Jonas’, I went up the street with Greg to see Christina. Brett called so I had lunch with him, then went back to chez Wadsworth and worked on the seva laptop for a few hours. Christina made me decaf chai that turned out pretty cool.

After that I tried to hook up with Chloe – she lives across the street from Jonas and I’d seen her that morning and said I’d drop by – but she was out. I played phone tag with her for hours. Then I hit the grocery store and drove home.

One of Chloe’s messages informed me she was having a housewarming party that night, and Brett and I decided to go. But after dinner I was having some panic symptoms so I went upstairs to meditate…

…and woke up at midnight. Brett was asleep on the couch. FUCK. We missed the party.

I got a month’s worth of Paxil for my anxiety symptoms. Then I went to the website and read the entire prescribing information PDF and decided not to take it. I’ll stick with yoga, hydration, meditation, caffiene-avoidance, and St. John’s Wort. Thank you very much.

Holy cow. Fuck Paxil. First of all, it takes weeks to begin to work, secondly they really have no idea what it does or how, and third of all the list of possible side effects include – at a statistically low .03%, BUT STILL – death by horrible physical dysfunction. Not to mention what happens when you go off of the shit. Not to mention they gave me the wrong dose anyway: I should have gotten 12.5mg, not 25mg. 25mg is for depression, not anxiety.

I haven’t had an actual panic attack since I did this program J. loaned to me (it comes with a cool audio track of a nifty 23-minute ‘visualization exercise’ that always puts me RIGHT to sleep), but I still sporadically have all the symptoms: racing heart, skipped beats, sweating, tension, EXTREME DISCOMFORT, insomnia, blah blah blah. In my case, the overwhelming feeling of panic is a reaction to the pre-existing physical sensations. So I’ve stopped having to feel like that, but it’s still a royal pain in the ass to feel like I’m on bad speed. Waah.

Now it’s Easter Sunday and I’m blogging from a computer at 1-Stop Rental. Joe called me this morning and begged for coffee and something delicious to eat, so I came into town and got him two cans of Starbucks espresso and a raspberry croissant (and myself a DECAF Radiance Dairy latte) (*sigh*). Then his mom and her boyfriend showed up with his lunch, so I sat my ass in front of the goblinbox and started typing.

I LOVE MAROON 5. I DO NOT CARE HOW GAY THIS IS. And yes, I know their band name is awful. They’re just SO fucking adorable. (One of the reviews at Amazon.com said ‘every song on the album is about sex, which I don’t really like.’ WTF? Isn’t all pop music about sex?!) It’s just so hooky and tasty and funky and yummy. And I no longer give a shit about liking cheese – remember my Hall & Oates post?! After THAT, I’m not ashamed to admit anything.

I downloaded this track off the Internet.

It’s a bootleg.

It says it’s “Prince with Miles Davis – Live at Paisley Park.”

Now, it’s definitely Prince. And it’s definitely live. But where’s Miles Davis? The hook in the beginning of the track is probably a keyboard, and the horn scat at the end is a tenor sax, not a trumpet.

I complained here once about downloading Al Green songs, only to discover that out of three tracks, not one of them was the Reverend Al Green. Two were Bill Withers, and one was some horrid community college choir covering a Gladys Knight & The Pips tune (which really freaked me out when it came up on my iPod one evening)!

We’re all familiar with memes – and how they grow. I just can’t help wondering what the impact of badly tagged MP3s will have on people’s understanding of music in general. Imagine: what if you had an MP3 on your computer that you thought was Miles Davis playing with Prince, and you believed that it was exactly that for years? I mean, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter, but the idea of people walking around thinking Bill Withers is Al Green drives me nuts. Seriously. It’s just… wrong.

Believe you me: my freakin’ ID3 tags are CORRECT. ALL THE TIME.
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