Kings & Queens

i am the eternal revisionist. Dana and I spent all day mastering on Saturday and I think we are ‘there’. We now have two sets of mastered music. We are listening; in cars, in rooms, on headphones, on mountains – all that kind of thing. I may have heard this music too much. Dana says we got it. I am still doing the ‘did we get it?’ routine. Meanwhile i discovered said Danaman’s podcast. You must try out his dulcit tones sometime.

The night before mastering we visited the most-groovy Magic Theatre for some Magical Mystery tour, a new Hella video and an endless fartumentary by Spencer. A perfect primer for the next day. I love that part in MMT with the Flying tune – you know, that’s one of only two songs with all 4 of them credited as song writers. nice.

Today we are mastering. in fact its time to go right now… The other day we went to SF. here’s some pictures

oh, that’s the Luckey Remington.

just beginning to mess around really. Got a rubber stamp and some cardboard sleeves. oh and rollers (they didn’t work), acrylic paint (not doing it) and spray cans (not right yet but will be cool) – and a glue gun.

A comfortably surreal day including some LA breakfast with Dave and some time with Laurel at capitol records. we’d met briefly a couple times back at Pleased shows and so this time it was at her place in the big round building. Some complete poser in a shiny new haircut escorted us to the elevator and her office. Terrible. Anyway, now, obviously major labels will not sign this project but Laurel’s a cool lass and she gave us some ideas and we wasted her afternoon talking music rubbish and listening to her old nirvana cassette demos. how civilized. It must be said there’s something weird about listening to your own music being cranked by the director of a&r here. i mean, i do like records on capitol. sinatra was on capitol right? and the Stranglers…

LA has an addictive quality and we didn’t really want to leave but we had reservations at a joshua tree motel. Everyone else had the same idea to leave LA that evening. We paid dearly. Fucking LA and its bloody traffic. 5 hours through hail and rain to Joshua Tree. The desert is dry…

we’re in LA. We drove for amny hours for to get here. we went to Hanks with Dave and Michelle and talked ghost stories. Fine company, fine atmosphere (Neil Diamond blasted way too loud) and a fine evening. I forgot my camera so this’ll have to do.

Didn’t quite make it today. Mastering was cool til we hit some glitch noise stuff from when we fed the tape back into the dread slow-tools. So… it’ll be a bit longer. In the meantime i just want to write new stuff and forget about whether the guitars are too bright or the organ is too muddy or the vocals are weird or whatever it is that day. I now want to play these tunes with people in a room. Instead i watched all 3 lord of the rings back to back. That’s inspiration. It would have been religious if not for the screaming eyes and aching back. Here’s some pictures from the other day up at Tahoe. Yes its full of people that somehow look like the word tahoe sounds but it don’t half look good….

Actually i’m glad we didn’t finish today – that would mean it was all over and there was no time for pints at the Bonn Lair so that just would not do.

Knocked this idea up while mastering. Stamps and a spray can should see this come to light. Or something like it. Simple. I like simple. Droney music demands droney grafix. This is the first thing that popped in there so this will likely never see the light of day… but then sometimes first ideas stick and all that…

Settling into the new mixes. We are mastering on tuesday and that’s the way it is… Noah had a listen the other day and seemed to be relatively into it despite the lack of hairyness or fairyness. A good sign. Here’s some cool stuff from the studio. Love those old pieces of technology.

i just got very self concious about this whole thing. the songs, the playing, the name, the idea, the pictures… the songs. sometimes its bloody hell doing this stuff. why can’t i not give a shit. i don’t give a shit about some aspects of this but there is a base level of shit giving that i have. i give a shit about how it sounds.

i’m sitting here listening to Dana tweaking the drum sounds of our final track and it occurs to me that its all coming to an end. The process of recording has spanned many months, if not so many actual days, and aside from the inevitable self-doubting moments its been a beautiful thing. So now we’re mixing the last one the dream ends in fury (a warm and fuzzy instrumental that will likely open the record) and i think its time to start working on new stuff so that we don’t ever need to stop. That being said, i am too tired to write a moving epitaph to the sessions right now so here’s a blurry pic as we fade out…