I’m sitting here making noise. I hope Kristen appreciates it. I make a LOT of noise. It’s like – my brain is idling and making this…. Noise.
At the moment it’s something lalalalalalala. But before it was a little beatbox rhythm. The poor girl’s picked up a bit of that. But she’s not very good at it. It’s sort of squishy sounding. It’s cute. I’m all like BOOM chicka BOOM and she’s all like pssh psh pssssh.
It’s all like that.
The last couple of weeks have been an intense period of fundraising and DOING. Getting the new album has proven stressful and crazy – and though I would never second-guess the decision to make it a double-disc it HAS doubled certain parts of the work. Heather’s kind of helming the studio disc and I’m almost completely in charge of the Live CD. And of course I’ve also got design and production duties. Kristen’s driving as we listen to the latest (and I believe final) mixes of Another Live (the Live disc of Another Life / Another Live) and I must admit, I’m pretty fucking impressed with myself. (Valeri – gorgeous)
I Love LIVE music. I have ever since I discovered it thanks to my high school girlfriend taking me to see her school’s acoustic coffeehouse… it’s where I discovered my first guitar-girl crush. I didn’t know it then but that night totally changed the course of my Life.
Studio CDs will often leave me cold, especially after I’ve seen a Live performance. There aren’t too many exceptions to this – Dave Matthews and John Mayer are two artists who I can’t stand… but for their amazing Live CDs. Ani Difranco’s studio discs don’t hold a candle to the Living in Clip discs. The Indigo Girls have had amazing albums but none compare to the spectacular Back on the Bus Y’All. Exceptions include Metallica (their Live discs just suck) and Rage Against the Machine (what is it with the metal bands?)… but man, Another Live is awesome.
We’re listening now – and Will is thundering out of the speakers and Kristen’s cello rises and falls and Sharif’s piano ATTACKS and I can probably second-guess myself a billion times (is my guitar a little low here?) , (Will – fade in could be cleaned up) but all-in-all I’m really, really, really happy. I think it really captures us beautifully.
Another Life is awesome too – but it’s coming from the engineering paws of professionals so it better be!
The final countdown till the disc goes to press on Thursday morning is frenetic and kind of awful. The last couple of days have seen 8-hour rob-at-the-computer days with additional hours put in as I felt inspired. This morning I woke up at around the same time I’ve BEEN waking up, race down to the store, do the day, race to Bowie, run my open mic, race home and make whatever last tweaks I hear while listening now… (Oklahoma – cello too hot? Too bassy? [nope] – piano too low?)
Tomorrow morning I’ve got to be out of the house by 8am to get into Asparagus by 9am for a marathon mixing session. We’ve been doing one song a day – but here we are down to the wire and we’re going to do TWO songs tomorrow. It’s crazy to think that years ago we’d do 8 – 10 hour sessions in the studio. Nowadays we barely have the stamina for five before our attention span gets hazy.
After we mix for however long we mix I speed up to Baltimore to run Teavolve – go home – go to bed. Tuesday morning I sleep in for an hour and then have a 10am start time with Airshow Mastering. I’m not sure what to expect from that at all. My experience with mastering has been that I totally don’t know what’s going on and just watch the engineer be magical. Eyewitness accounts who’ve worked with the guy we’ll be dealing with tomorrow (Charlie Pilzer) tell me to expect this to be similar… Tuesday we’ll do the tough stuff, pushing through as many of the 15 tracks on Another Live as we’re able to (theoretical estimates put that at 7.5 hours – but at least one track’s just a banter track… I don’t know WHAT I’m facing). (Drown – holy shit this is a bad ass song)
Wednesday’s more of the same, picking up where ever we leave off on Tuesday and doing the studio tracks… And Wednesday night we’ll finally have the final lengths of the studio tunes, I’ll plug those into the graphics, do one last look and start uploading it all to Discmakers… we call them in the morning, give them some money, look over the proofs – presumably give the okay for said proofs… and then we wait for about a week before we go pick it all up in New Jersey.
And then Wednesday afternoon I run a musical event outdoors in Takoma Park, then we drive up to Frederick and play a bar gig and I hope to be home and in bed by three. Snooooooof. (Allergy – maybe I brought the cello down a bit too low?)
