Kings & Queens

Back to the Hangar in a minute… We have 4 songs to complete and 2 to remix if possible. Things sometimes change over night and what you thought was ‘it’ was not it but something very close to it. Spent the wee hours last night adding some stuff to “the Dream Ends in Fury” but i think i may have got a little off track and slightly delusional. Yesterday I had Biff Rose in my living rooom. Hunky Dory. Funny how things are. I did this poster for him… dig that olde tyme style. Alright.

i’m itching to get back into the hangar now. we are so close to being done but i have one remix and 4 tunes still to be mixed… i wish we had a week to do this… but now i just want these tapes full of good sounding stuff. time to get the band back together. Hall and Oates were just on vh1classic. private eyes. i feel a direction change coming on…

We mixed for something like 18 hours yesterday. Til almost 6am. It was brutal and our ears were blacking out but we got very cclose to completion at the Hangar. 9 songs down. I think it sounds great but to be honest i may not be able to listen to these tunes for a while. Thanks to many microwave snacks, endless solitaire, some drinks and the late madness, friday night came and went in the great metropolis of Sacramento. Driving quietly home, through the deserted streets in the rain at 6am, was one of those almost cinematic moments that you only get when over-exhaustion gives way to extreme focus. I’m knackered.

So the end of 14 and half hours in the studio leaves us totally set up and with 3 songs complete. The difficult-lots-of-guitar-organs-etc… ones: Fire Escape, A Heart’s Ease and SLow Motion. The Pete tunes actually. Tomorrow we have 11 songs to do. Sounds daunting, is daunting and it may or may not happen. But 2 are very short and simple and most of the rest are just simple… i think. It sounds beautiful thanks to the patience of a man named Dana who deals so eloquently with our little (tiny) nit-picks. He only lost his shite once and i only had to leave with songwriter’s doubt once. Andi made a scarf and read a lot of music mags… The hangar is a crazy large cavernous place full of skate ramps and wonderful equipment. We blew the power out once, and ate three burritos.

Quick post. we are on second mix of the day. Hopefully we’ll hit 5 today but its late already. We had some loss of tracks at one point which required some nifty redos by the dream team (andi, dana = incredible vocal peoples) but we’re still going strong. More later. internet not in the room.

I wonder if its a good sign that a pattern of bad humour has already set in. We haven’t even reached the Hangar yet but the by-product of many hours of repetion listening has taken its toll at an early stage. None of this should be funny but in the later hours, with only energy drinks and rolled gold for vice, Pitch Good and many others that should not be mentioned, come out to play.

Tonight’s stuff:
- Tambourine on Colder intro.
- Much Solitaire abuse
- Audio cleanup on lead vocals for: Fire Escape, Heads or Tails.
- Little tiny… tiny things like that.

Seeing as the Hangar has broadband wi-fi i’m looking into getting the iSight set up as a streaming feed for the many long, uninteresting hours of mixing – stay tuned!

Getting ready for a final check on things tonight and then mixing tomorrow at the Hangar. Drop by for cocktails… (scroll down here to see Dana’s name and then see who’s above. Warms the cockles of me heart.)

Now we are close. So close. Finally its sounding how I imagined. Brighton sound gave birth to two new bass tracks (All in Favour and Colder retakes to get better tone) and a whole load of editing and pre-mix preparation; making deciscions on vocal takes, organ parts, guitar takes etc… We still have a few hours werk left that hopefully we’ll get time on tuesday to clear up here. This means it may have been the last day at Brighton Sound for these songs. I want it finished but i don’t want it to end…

Everything is just about ready. Emily got started early this morning. Misty morning in Nevada City. She insists that she’s barely played a note for years but its hard to believe. We now have a haunting (yes, it sounds pretentious to say) cello melody on Confessed Again. When she first started playing the part that had been rattling around my head for so long I felt like doing some air punching or at least just lying back and weeping. It is after all in Dminor; the saddest of all keys. Anyway, it was wonderful to record Ms. Newsom at the Manor and it filled the final checkbox in the recording sheet. Another air-punch there, probably.

Right after that we loaded a couple of instruments in to the car, just in case, and rolled downhill to Brighton for our last session. Basically the next two days are to be preparing our songs for mixing next week. So slotting in all the tracks we’ve recorded in the last two weeks up here and making sure everything is just-so before we start pushing faders. Dana is on form and the core kings & queens team is back together. Time flies at this little studio. Especially when there’s occasional Yacht Rock breaks and UFO clips.

Popped in on the Fools Foundation and saw some mesmerizing space out laptop jams from Bird Show and Greg Davis. Smooth.

The manor was humming with combo organs today. Andi put down All in Favour on the Hammond, Coming Apart on the Yamaha yc-20 and Slow Motion on the Vox. Fine werk indeed. We rounded off the day with ‘Munich’ – grisly Spielberg.