The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 13

Since we are not playing out as a band as much as we used to, I have been playing these small gigs by myself. These gigs are usually in a form that I would describe as songwriter showcases. Where two to four songwriters play about 30 minutes each, or rotate one song each. The rotation gigs can be fun, but you need the right mix of people since you are performing as a weird sort of band. Recently, I've been really enjoying the straight up line-up ones. In those, one has more time to develop the performance, and there is no need to be so strictly song oriented. The one line-up showcase that I've enjoyed the most, enough that I've returned several times, is the Songslinger's Showcase that Brandon Herndon and John Pardue put together. I like Songslingers for various reasons. One is that Brandon and John pick the people and for the most part I trust their taste. It's also good that they host it at our home base bar, The Cave.

Last night I played one of these gigs. It's usually three or four people and we each get about 30 minutes, which is just about as long as I can stand myself by myself on stage. And that is one of the hardest things about these gigs, the fact that I have to play by my lonesome. And boy do I get nervous. I've played for years and years in bands in all kinds of stages, and have never gotten as nervous about a band gig as I do about these solo gigs. However, recently I have figured out that two shots of bourbon and two beers is all I need to kill the nervous bug.

Last night I got there early and even though I've learned exactly how much I can drink, I was feeling good so I went ahead and doubled the dose. Four shots of Ancient Age later... I think I played one song all the way through. Mostly I'd start playing a song, then stop in the middle, to comment on something about the song, or something totally unrelated to anything, then I would realize that I didn't want to go back to that song, so I'd start another one. And so on. At some point I played part of Peter Gabriel's Red Rain as some kind of joyful celebration of the victory of red, which to most of the world is the color of the left, while blue is the color of the right. In the USA the colors are backwards. As was apparently my logic last night. So my 30 minutes turned into some kind of comedy routine. And, surprisingly, everyone loved it, nothing like a train wreck performance to captivate an audience.

Meanwhile back at the studio....

We are really close to finishing all the tracking for the record. We were hoping to release the record by the end of 2008, but it looks like we won't. But it does look like we'll be done with the tracking by the end of the year, so we should be able to mix and master and release it in early 2009.

In the meantime, here's a couple of songs in their almost-finished, unmixed, and unmastered glory.

Stayed and Gone - this one now has Alex Bowers on piano, and most recently Seamus Kinney laid down some sexy trombone on it.

Season of the Grape - this one now has Nathan Golub on pedal steel, and Alex on piano, and even a bit of cuica.

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 12

We played a show last night. The first of a handful of shows we'll be playing to warm up for the release of the record. We played at the Reservoir for an excellent local crowd. The Alcazar Hotel opened up and they played some great cheaptrick spiced rock, very good tunes.

Diane and I played with Stu Cole on bass, Nathan Golub on pedal steel and Nathan Logan on drums. Jarrod from Damnit Online was there and he took some cool pictures (like the one above). It was one of the most enjoyable shows we've played. When even the mistakes turn out right, you know it's a good night. Great audience, great bar, great band, and Diane stole the show like only she knows how to do. I love you, love of my life.

What else could we ask for? Oh, it was a free show like all these pre-record release shows will be.

So today, I am recovering from the night's madness and my brain is too fried to write about anything else, and I'm not going to ruin last night's experience by trying to describe it in words, anymore than what I've already said.

Stay tuned for the next pre-record release show.

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 11

We are approaching the end of this project. It’s been almost two years since we started putting the songs together for this. And soon we will be doing final mixes, mastering, and artwork, and then finally manufacturing the thing. But there is still a little bit of recording to be done.

Recently Nathan Golub came in and put down pedal steel and cuatro parts on some of the tracks. Nathan is one of those string wizards one sometimes has the luck to meet; give him anything with strings and he’ll make it sound good. He can probably make music out of shoe strings. He played my old beat up cuatro and fell in love with it so he asked if I knew how to get one. A quick call to my mom in Puerto Rico and she was off to see her cuatro maker friend who quickly set Nathan up with a nice new cuatro.

Nathan recorded cuatro parts on three songs, but the bulk of the work he did was on pedal steel. For the pedal steel, we set up a Peavy Nashville 112 amplifier in a sound room, and Nathan sat in the control room, running through the amp and also direct. The session was, like Koko Goldstein might say, smooth. Nathan had already played the songs with us live, so it was just a matter of streamlining the material for the record. And Nathan is not only an attentive player, but also very easy to work with.

The coolest part of the whole session, though, might have been recording with the plate reverb. On the record, there is a crazy transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster. Neither song has a pedal steel part, but we thought that the transition between them could use some. Well, to tell the truth, at this point we’re throwing everything we got into this transition. Later we’ll have to spend some time editing and mixing it. So when we were about to record the pedal steel part for the transition, Jesse Olley (engineer/co-producer extraordinaire) suggested we use the reverb plate. Reverb plate, said I? What reverb plate? And Jesse said I probably hadn’t noticed it, but it was right against the wall in the room with all the guitars. I had been in that room many times, so I went back and looked again. The reason I hadn’t noticed it is because it looks just like a super long, super tall and super narrow box, almost the size of the wall. I thought it was the wall.

I sent Jesse and email to get some details about the plate. Here’s what he wrote: “It’s an Echoplate II with modifications designed and sold by the guy who originally built it in Chicago in 1983, the last year of production. It's a suspended sheet of stainless steel with a speaker driver and two transducer pickups mounted on the plate. The one control is labeled reverb time scale. It goes from from 1 to 8. It came from the late Wavecastle Studio in Hillsboro where (among others) Zen Frisbee and The Family Dollar Pharaohs recorded their albums.”

Jesse continues, “Here’s a picture of the reverb plate with the side of it removed so you can see the plate.


Note the one cable in, two cables out on top and the lever, top left. The speaker magnet is in the center. The original pickups are the small black things stuck on the plate, the new (modified) ones are the brass disks lower on the plate.”

So we hooked up the pedal steel to the reverb plate, and cranked it up to 7. It was like swimming in an ocean of melted steel. I only wish we could take that monster to a solo pedal steel performance, on top of a mountain, with giant amplifiers pushing the waves of steel down the mountain like musical lava.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Nathan’s session.

First, the last two minutes of Walk, featuring a steel solo.

Walk excerpt

And then some of the craziness going on in the transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster.

Itch to Feet Beat Faster transition excerpt


Bonus links:

A Little Reverb History

How to build your own plate reverb

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 10

Baby Camilia


the end of the first act. the cliff hanger. the curtain before intermission. the impulse to change. the reason to try something different. the suggestion of a new beginning. the swing of the pendulum.

A Live Song

We haven't been playing live all that much recently. We've played maybe five or six shows since last October. But we still love to play live, though for various reasons (among them the record we've been working on very slowly) we haven't done it that much recently. So it is possible that some of you have not seen us play live in some time. Well here's Itch, recorded live at our most recent show at the Cave. That's with Stu Cole on bass, Matt Vooris on drums and Tone Pham making a special appearance on trumpet at the end. You can also hear and download this song on our ReverbNation page here.

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 9

Last weekend we did some location recording. Our engineer, Jesse, has this really cool handheld recorder, which does 2-track recording with a 4-mic capsule configuration. It fits in your hand, takes about a second to set up, and you’re ready to record on location. It’s a nice little machine and we took it out to record various bits that we want to use for the record.

The first thing we did was use it for Marina's first recording session.
We recorded about 5 minutes of her playing on two toy pianos. I know, bear with me for a moment. Here’s a very very short video of one of the compositions she performed for the recording. This one we call A Very Very Short Composition 1.



Marina’s recording will be used as an intro to a song called Baby Camilia. The idea is that the song will transition from Marina’s piano recording to pianist Alex Bowers' recording on the same toy pianos, to Alex’s recording on a grownup piano. Musically the track is a solo piano instrumental piece loosely based on the song Camilia, a version of which was posted last week. So in a sense Baby Camilia works as a prelude to the later Camilia song.

There is a lot of Marina in this record, not only her voice and her tinkering on various instruments, but also her presence and her influence on the music, how it was written, performed and recorded. Ultimately the record is for her. It is the record that, if she is ever interested, in 15, 20, 30 years, she can listen to it and get a sense of what home was like back then.

After recording Marina’s piece, we went to the Local 506 and met up with Grandmaster of Ceremonies Hoppie to record him doing a carny call. He is better known for his MC'ing skills with a microphone and a top hat introducing some band, or a rock paper scissors match, but he transitioned nicely to a megaphone and a top hat trying to convince people to step right up. Along the way we also picked up some nice ambient sounds.

Further down is a draft of the Carny Call track, which leads into another track, Itch, which leads into another, Feet Beat Faster (or something like that, the title has not been decided upon yet).

The Carny Call draft is composed of a bunch of different stuff recorded all over the place. I did this draft in garageband with my crappy headphones, and afterwards, when i played it on the regular "nice" stereo, it sounded way more muddled than it did on the headphones. Go figure. Listening to it on the stereo we figured that Hoppie’s vocal track will need to be upped a little and given more separation. But this is not supposed to be perfect, just good enough to get a general idea so that when we go into the studio to cut the final version together, we’ll have a good blueprint to guide us. At any rate, if you listen to it I recommend using headphones.

Itch is pretty close to finished, but it still needs a lead instrument during the instrumental break (suggestions?) and there is a little bit more work to do on the ending/transition.

Feet Beat Faster is also pretty close to being done, except there will be piano at the tail end of it, big piano chords, like giant footsteps. The quote at the beginning of the song is from Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo Viejo.

Here’s the three tracks back to back – Carny Call into Itch into Feet Beat Faster

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 8

Sometimes it’s nice the way a project develops over a long period of time. And by project I mean the working out of particular ideas and their documentation.

As time and energy are put into it, the project begins to take a life of it's own and to suggest it's own development. A long time ago, when I started working on the material that would end up being part of this project, I did it in an intuitive sort of way. A conversation with someone would stick in my head, or an image, or a dream, or a particular melody or structure. As these stuck in my head i would start putting them together into ditties and verses, bits and pieces. Over the past year, I've recorded the material and listened to it and edited it, and then re-recorded it and listened again, and edited again. And this cycle has been repeated several times. And each time connections between the parts and what the project is about begins to take focus.

Formally, it is shaping up to be in part a concept album, in the sense that it explores related ideas from different angles. It’s also a little bit like a musical, because there is an underlying story, although the story is more implied than literal. It does, however, have a certain melodramatic quality to it that is reminiscent of musicals. Ultimately, however, a formal categorization of the project is not that important except as it helps us move forward by giving it some momentary cohesiveness as it threatens to run wild. However, if one thing has become clear over the past year, it is that this record is an exploration into an ocean of intersections and contradictions, a place where opposites are not so opposite. In particular it is an exploration of how the way we feel about home and leaving can change over time.

Over the time I've been working on this project I've had many ups and downs about my feelings for it. We've kept on track though and now we've moved "out of a red flare of dreams and into a common light of common hours. Until old age brings the red flare again." In that common light of common hours we float amidst a group of sounds, words and ideas that are taking audible shape as a horizon all around us. A changing horizon, so that what begins sounding like an answer often ends up being a question. “I hear the sounds of home” as a statement made by me changes suddenly into “Do you hear the sound of footsteps?” as a question I am being asked. And the horizon begins to take shape and as it does it gives the project its shape. Like the two years I spent reading the Brothers Karamazov, towards the end I felt like Dostoevsky was reading me rather than the other way around.

So what follows are windows whereby you can see individual tracks from the group that together form the ocean on which we tread, the ocean that is this project. Actually it's more like surfing. Catching that wave as it's rising, standing up on the board and riding it until the board is flowing with the wave. Then seeing the crest begin to turn and the pipe start to form, and we hunch down, point one hand towards the future, and use the other hand to trace the inside of the wave, feeling its shape, its flow, the undertow lifting from behind and propelling us forward. It is then that we begin to carve our leads into the giant and the music begins to really sing.

Ideally, at the end, the tracks should stand on their own, but right now it’s hard for me to see them individually. In each track I hear the echoes of the previous ones and the anticipation of the ones that follow. It feels weird to separate them from the group to post them individually here. Like my friend who would get all excited about playing a record, then he would play you only the first 10 or 20 seconds of a song before skipping to the next one. He wanted to play you the whole record in one minute. I always though that was so annoying. This feels like I'm doing that to you. But I'm not, because this songs can stand on their own. I hope.

We have been approaching these ideas with several different methodologies. Here's a sample of the method whereby we start with drums and go from there. This is Double Sunglasses Sunday, which you heard in a previous post as a garageband sketch. Here it is still in a fairly basic form and still needing some work, but at this juncture this version is a good representation of the shape of the song.

Another method we are using is to start with vocals and guitar and go from there. Camilia is one of the songs we are producing that way. The plan is to add to this some piano, for more percussive rhythm, and pedal steel for more tears and air at the instrumental bridge.

On the above link, Camilia is followed right away by Double Sunglasses Monday which is what it’s like being lost in Montreal. In a previous post I posted the original Garageband version of this song. Here it is now in its almost complete form with real instruments.

I’m really getting a kick from transitions.

We are using other methods, including recording some songs live under the James Taylor bridge where the cars go thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thump high above, but I’ll tell you more about those later.

It’s nice working on a project at this pace. Like a chess game where days go by between moves, but with more players. Maybe like that old negotiating game, remember Diplomacy?


In other news:

Valient Himself, leader of the Venusian rock and roll band Valient Thorr is donating one of his kidneys to his earth father. Read the press release here.

As a result of this Valient Himself has incurred some debt and to help pay for the debt he is auctioning a number of his paintings and has also promised to make a line drawing of any picture you send him for just $29.00 ($25 + $4 S&H). Here’s the link to that follow up post.

So contact Valient Himself through the Valient Thorr myspace page or write to Valient Himself at cloudbox@hotmail.com and ask for details. Valient Himself is doing the hard work of donating the kidney, your part would be to send a few dollars to help him pay the bills, and you’ll get an original Venusian line drawing of your mug, or any mug you like.

The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 7

Part of me resists writing these posts, these posts about our recording project. These posts about music most of you probably won’t care to hear in its finished form, much less in the incomplete and imperfect form found in these posts. Part of me wants to wait until everything is done so I can just say, here it is, love it or leave it, I don’t care, it’s done, I’ve moved on to other projects. Part of me doesn’t want to discuss it unless you are playing on the record. That part of me says that I don’t remember why I started writing about this in the first place, says that whatever the reason was, it probably wasn’t all that good of a reason anyway, and says that I am conceited to think anyone cares and that if I stop now, no one will say, hey what happened to that series of posts about the record you were recording? That part of me wants me to hide the incomplete parts, wants me to hide in a basement somewhere and not say anything ever unless it’s absolutely true and necessary, anything more than the completely true and necessary is vain, pointless, selfish. That part of me may very well be right.

But I don’t care. The other part of me, calls that part chicken-shit. The other, stubborn part of me wants me to finish what I started. The other, bullshitting part of me likes crap whose reason and meaning might be hidden from me, might be so hidden that I won't see it until I take my last breath, or maybe never, maybe it doesn't have any, and maybe its attraction and beauty is precisely the result of that very lack of reason and meaning. So that other part of me wants to show how stuff is put together, wants to show little pieces that might end up making the whole, wants to show how this record is different from other records we’ve done, wants to let the crap fly to the four winds, devil be damned, before it ends up in the cutting room floor. This other part of me sometimes hopes that when you hear the finished record, you’ll feel like you were part of its creation, feel like you heard the songs when they were merely a few chunks of undigested chords. But this other part of me, also thinks, to hell with it, this is what I’m doing, and who needs a reason for anything. Because this part of me likes to go on about nothing, constantly dwelling on nothing, constantly trying to make something out of nothing, constantly trying to find the little bit of something in all that nothing.

And if nothing else this series of posts should at least be a document of how our record was made, a document of how we made a record after having a baby during her first years, a document of music in transition. A document which maybe, just maybe, long after I'm gone, she'll read as she listens to the record and feel something special thinking that this record was all done for her.

Ok, so a few weeks back we picked up the recording after the holiday break and I put some guitars to substitute the scratch guitars that were there with the drum tracks. Not really too much to report from that session. But some days later Stu Cole put some bass tracks down. You’ve already heard his name mentioned on this blog, so let me tell you a little about Stu.

I’ll tell you a recent story because I think it conveys the spirit of the man when it comes to music. Last year, on Thursday November 1, I went to the Orange County Social Club (a bar in the town of Carrboro which is in Orange County NC) to have a drink after work, and I ran into Stu. He had been out late late for Halloween the night before and wasn’t fully recovered. We had a few drinks and an old friend of Stu’s who he hadn’t seen for some time showed up. I left them catching up in the back patio and went inside for drinks. I guess I took a bit longer than I thought because when I went back out, Stu had walked the five or so blocks to where his car was parked and had walked back with his stand-up bass, so that his buddy, who fetched his guitar from his car out back, and him could play a few songs sitting in the back of the OCSC. There was no one there but us three, so it wasn’t like a concert or anything of the kind. It was two buddies playing music together, playing bits of songs, helping each other remember old songs they’d played together, sharing new music they’d been working on, laughing, singing, playing and having a good time. I kept going inside to talk to the people at the bar and out to the patio to watch them play a song or two and back inside. Once in a while someone would hear the music and walk up and sit and listen for a bit, and then go on their way. It was all very casual and it went on for a good two hours.

Eventually Stu’s friend had to go. By then both Stu and I were fairly toasted, but Stu had the added weight of the previous night’s Halloween debauchery plus a stand-up bass to carry. I offered to walk with him to his car so we could drop off the bass and figure out what to do next. But the bass is a big instrument to carry drunk for five blocks. So we crossed the street with some difficulty and reached Southern Rail (aka The Trains), which at this point had been opened for just a month or two. We decided we needed a rest stop. After all, we had made it across the street from OCSC, so a reward was in order. As luck would have it, there just so happened to be an old-timey band about to start playing in the main platform/bar area of The Trains. These were four guys with no amplification at all, fiddle, banjo, mandolin and washboard. And in walks Stu with a stand-up bass he can barely carry.

Master songwriter Jim Smith, immediately spotted us, and comes up to Stu and will not take no for an answer, not that Stu was trying to get out of it. Jim carried Stu’s bass to where the four unsuspecting gentlemen were about to start playing, took the bass out of the case and held it up while he waited for Stu, who stumbled over to the bass and barely got behind it as the group started their set. It was like Popeye and spinach. Without missing a beat, Stu was on. It was hard to tell if he was holding the bass up or if the bass was holding him up, but there was no denying that he was rockin' that Brutus of a bass. And just to be sure, the old timey band, right away on the first song, threw him a solo, Stu handled it like the captain of a hundred stormy seas, and from then on the old-timey band was up and away riding a ship fueled by Stu and his bass.

After that the night got even crazier, but that is another story. What I’m trying to say here is that Stu is not only an incredible bass player, but also a musician with a true love for music. This is a player who’s in a band that (according to the wiki, anyway) had a platinum record, has been on all the late night shows, Sesame Street, the Olympics, president Clinton’s inaugural ball, you name it. But even with all that “success”, his real success is that he has remained true to the music. And he is never too tired to play or record with a friend.

Originally we were going to record at Stu’s little farm cabin studio, but the studio had to be shut down. I still wanted Stu to be part of the project so I asked him if he would play some bass on the record and he readily agreed.

We set up a date with Jesse Olley, who is co-producing and engineering the record, and I gave Stu a CD with what we had, which was drums and guitars with some scratch vocals. After that I met with him three or four times. Each time we sat and listened to the tracks, and talked about them, and he would play little bits on whatever instrument was available. And I would respond and we would listen some more and talk some more. We did a lot more talking than playing and we never played the songs all the way through from beginning to end. The night before the session, I was nervous. I’ve heard Stu play many times, and I’ve heard his recordings, so I trusted him, but I hadn’t heard him play any of the songs we were going to record from beginning to end, and this way of recording one instrument at a time is still new to me, so I was nervous.

The recording day arrived and we went to Jesse’s Ultra Fin Riz Studio. We had a five hour session ahead of us and about 10 songs/parts of songs to work on. The plan was to do as much as possible and then come back another day to finish. We decided to do the electric bass parts first since those were the majority, and Stu suggested a direct line and then just punch and run. Jesse and I must be from the same school that doesn’t trust direct lines too much, so we ran the bass direct and through different amps, but the direct line always sounded best. So we went with that, and then Stu proceeded to lay down 9 of the 10 songs we were working on, in one of the smoothest sessions I’ve ever participated in. We did not get the full impact of Stu's playing as I've seen it on stage, ripping it up like some rock god, instead Stu put solid bass parts that enhance the songs without drawing attention to themselves. They were the perfect bass parts for this record. And besides that, I got a master recording lesson.

There were a couple of factors that made this session such a success, aside from Stu’s expertise. The first was the punch and run method, which was a definite eye opener for me. The second was the importance of talking about the music and developing an understanding about it. As Stu laid down the bass parts, I realized that during the hours we had spent talking about the tracks we had developed a clear way of talking about the music much like the way that bandmates sometimes can. Understanding was the main obstacle, and once we understood each other the act of translating that understanding into music was actually fairly simple, at least when working with someone as skilled as Stu.

The way the session went was pretty much like this: Jesse would start recording and Stu would play the song up to a good stopping point, he would then ask me what I thought of that, and I’d say something like, maybe you can flip that last turnaround upside down, loosen it up a bit and come in on the three with that buddy holly bit, except make it more clouds and rain but add some Jupiter to it, and he knew exactly what I meant! And not only that, he would adjust accordingly, replay the part up to the break, stop, how was that? Perfect, I'd say. Ok, let’s keep going. Jesse would punch in there, and we’d move forward along the track, punching and running, sometimes back tracking a bit and redoing a section, until we’d get to the end. Then we would listen to the whole thing, and maybe do it one more time depending on how we felt about what we had. Sometimes we redid a beginning only, or a middle part, but for the most part it ran seamlessly, and for the most part when we got to the end of the track, it was done.

One is never to old to learn new tricks and this session taught me a few things. I had more than a few preconceptions blown away: that you have to know the song beginning to end to be able to record it, that recording with a direct box is not a good idea, that it’s better to be standing up when you record, that punching in is only for correcting mistakes, that one should play the song beginning to end like one would if it was a live performance. These are all preconceptions I’ve had from years of recording music as if it was live, from years of trying to capture in the studio what a band’s perfect live performance might be like, because all those things apply if you are playing live. But if one does away with the idea that a recording should somehow document what a band can do live, then one can judge a recording as just music. I'm sure all this is no news to many, and though I knew it in theory, this is the first record that I feel I've been putting that to practice. And while some purist part of me wants to call it cheating, the other part of me is quickly learning to call it recording.

Now, here’s a couple of tracks that are more traditional songs

First, here’s Stayed and Gone which I think you’ve now heard at various stages. This is just one guitar, drums, electric bass… still to be added is other stuff like vocals, trumpet and pedal steel.

And here’s Season of the Grape which you’ve also heard at a few stages along the way. This again is one guitar, drums and stand-up bass, which was recorded with some heavy duty mikes in an isolation booth, but still using the punch and run method.

Finally, here’s the first minute from Always Home, which includes a new intro, which used to be a separate bit called An Attempt, which was originally recorded as a segment for the NAP’s exquisite corpse experiment many months ago. That bit is now integrated into the song, at least by Garageband standards. Many of these more abstract bits such as An Attempt, which were recorded on Garageband are being slowly transferred to the masters at Jesse’s studio and re-mixed and re-edited for the record, but keeping the actual tracks.



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Se Acabaron las Navidades

Christmas is over in Puerto Rico. This Saturday, February 2nd, Dia de la Candelaria (Candlestick Day), everyone will take their dried up x-mas trees to the beach and burn them in huge bonfires.

The weekend before last was the official last party of the season with Las Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian. These Fiestas have grown from a little street fest for the local residents of Old San Juan into a massive festival with lots of corporate sponsors and the idiots that go along with the corporate sponsorship. I’m not sure how I would feel about going to them if I was there, but even so, I see from the picture below, that Billy Van is still going, so I think ultimately I would have to say, that if it is still good enough for Billy Van, it’s still good enough for me. Billy Van has developed over the past 20 or 30 years into a sort street leader for the fiestas, organizing random groups of singers and musicians, and leading them through the streets. Here’s a picture of Billy Van in action by the Ponce de Leon statue in the Placita de San Jose, with his trademark hat and megaphone. This is one huge parranda. Can you find all the instruments in the picture?