Sunday, March 21st, 2010
I’ve been working in schools for years, and I generally wake up not long after the sun, even when I’m on vacation. It’s not just from habit, though… there’s surely something genetic about it. My dad, who’s an early-riser, loves to reccount how when I was a child he’d often open his eyes in the morning and find my face staring at him from about six inches away, with my eyes wide open, just waiting for some company. The early morning cartoons would only keep me entertained for so long.
Brian and I live on nearly opposite schedules. He’s a true night-owl, more from insomnia, he says, than any preference for the dark hours. A pattern was established pretty early on in my stay, and we worked with it over the next eight days or so. We’d stay up all night, usually until about sunrise (I was adjusting to his schedule, obviously). I’d eventually throw in the towel, and Brian would stay up for a few hours by himself, drinking wine and playing the mandolin, skyping with his girlfriend in Argentina, or taking care of business stuff on the computer.
I’d try to sleep as late as I could, usually wake up before noon, then lay in bed listening to The Odyssey on my Creative Zen and praying I would crash out for a few more hours. Regardless of whether I did or not, there would be some serious time to kill before Brian was up and ready to start recording. I’d usually head into the neigborhood to buy some groceries, sometimes cook something up and sometimes grab myself a curry lunch special on Brick Lane, which was right around the corner from his place. Then I’d just play guitar in the living room and wait. It was a wonderfully comfortable and spacious room, a bit surreal with a hundred-year-old piano and a dried-up Christmas tree that Brian and Thea had decided to keep into the spring for some reason.
It worked out well, ’cause I liked having a few hours of practice before recording. My hands were so warmed up by the time I sat in front of the microphones that I could usually bang out my guitar parts in just a few takes, sometimes just one or two. It saved us a lot of frustration… there’s nothing more disheartening than doing twenty takes in a row and not being able to land one that’s perfect, totally buzz and error-free. It makes you feel incompetent. Nowadays, it’s easy to edit out any errors, but I’m a purist; I like knowing that the song is as real and unsynthetic as possible.
Anyway, Brian would get up in the afternoon, deal with chores and business stuff for a few hours, then we’d shut ourselves into the studio somewhere between 5-8pm. We’d work until we lost the inspiration, usually between 2-4am. Then we’d go upstairs, crack some wine, and Brian would cook while I played him songs that didn’t make my final cut for the sessions. Brian is no amateur in the kitchen, btw; he’s a serious culinary artist, no joke. Two of the standouts during my stay were braised duck burritos & crawfish soup with coconut milk and mango. We’d eat, drink and talk till I couldn’t hack it anymore, then I’d leave him sitting there to occupy his sleepless dawn however he could.
In total during my stay we recorded thirteen of my tunes. It took one day to do the microphone trials for my voice, as I wrote earlier on, one day to do the microphone trials for my guitar, and about three to actually record all my guitar parts. I was in London for ten days, so the rest of the time was for vocals and for bringing in other musicians.
Tags: Argentina, Brian Leininger, Brick Lane, Crawfish, Creative, Creative Zen, David Cevoli, insomnia, London, Mango, microphones, Odyssey, Skype
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Sunday, March 21st, 2010
The next day Brian and I got to work in his basement studio:
First job: microphone trials, determining which microphone to use to capture the vocals; everything else would be crafted around the voice, so establishing the sound we wanted for the voice was the first step. Basically, you sing a few lines and capture them on every available mic, then listen to each one and compare tonal qualities. Here’s a picture of all the microphones when they were setup:
The mics you see in the above photo:
-Neumann TLM 103
-AEA R44 (ribbon mic)
-AEA R92 (ribbon mic)
-TELE FUN KEN AK47 (a tube mic, w/ its own amplification)
-Blue: Kiwi
-Shure Sm57
I sang a few lines from “In the black space”, then we listened, and after clicking back and forth dozens of times (with Brian selecting and deselecting various plugins to accent certain frequencies), we determined upon the AEA R44 for its old-school analog qualities.
This mic is actually a remake of the RCA R44, which, Brian had informed me, is the mic Billie Holiday used to do a large percentage of her recordings… it was chosen objectively, though, since when listening to the various tracks I was unaware which track corresponded to which mic. It was thus chosen solely for the way it sounds, not for the fact that it was the coolest looking one nor because of its association with Billie, one of the original pioneers in vocal recording. The irony is that I’d read a biography of her not long before this, so images of her life had been floating around in my head over the previous months, her scrappy, poverty-stricken youth in Philadelphia, her pinnacle days as the queen of the Harlem club scene, her horrific and pathetic demise in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital in 1959, with police guards stationed outside her room to prevent her friends from supplying her with smack. Her friends were doing this not simply to deviously help her get high, but rather to keep her from having to confront two life battles at the same time: cirrhosis of the liver and heroine withdrawal. The two-front war proved too much for her body, and there was outrage among her friends at the authorities’ unwillingness to allow her to overcome cirrhosis before putting her through an enforced withdrawal by vigilantly overseeing her hospital bed. Before leaving New York I had wanted to go see her grave in the Bronx, but I failed to do so… eventually I will, though.
Between finding all the cables, setting up the mics, singing and listening over and over, this took quite a few hours. Brian and his roommate were having a party at their place that night (it was Saturday), so people had actually showed up before we were finished, and a few folks had come into the studio with us. London parties start quite early, apparently. This is seemingly due to the cultural habit of starting to drink as early in the evening as possible, which in itself is a result of the fact that ever since World War I and the “Defense of the Realm Act” of 1914 (when the government tried to force people to drink less, sleep well & be good workers) pubs in England have closed very early in the evening. During the Great War pubs had to close by 9:30pm, but this has very slowly been relaxed over time, so that the legally accepted time is now 11pm.
Toby, who I met the previous night, came into the studio just before we started to wrap things up for the day, as did one of Brian’s friend from recording school, who lent us another pair of ears. Eventually we worked our way upstairs, and things were kicking… I’ve moved around quite a bit in the last ten to twelve years, but this was definitely one of the most international parties I’ve ever been at. I met people from Poland, Moldova, Argentina, Portugal, Russia, Korea, Slovenia, Sweden, England, and Switzerland, not to mention me and Brian, from New York and Texas, respectively.
Tags: AEA R44, Billie Holiday, Brian Leininger, London, Manhattan Philadelphia, Metropolitan Hospital, Neumann, New York, Shure, Toby Slade-Baker
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Sunday, March 21st, 2010
On Friday, April 3rd, 2009, at around midnight, I landed at Stanstead Airport and got on the train to Liverpool Street Station. I had woken up at 6am that day to pack my bags, then worked the whole day, just had time to swing by my apartment in Sant Gervasi to grab my backpack and guitar, then headed off to El Prat, Barcelona’s main airport. Flying in commercial jetliners has never ceased to completely freak me out (I’m totally fine until I’m actually in the air, but every bump, every mechanical noise, has me grabbing the armrests in a vice grip), so I ate a couple of Xanax in the airport and ended up sleeping for nearly the whole two-hour flight. It was fantastic… I highly recommend that stuff, if you don’t like planes. Needless to say, however, I was more than a little groggy on the train into central London. Prior to my trip, I had uploaded an audiobook version of The Odyssey onto my mp3 player (I needed some inspiration for my own journey, and Homer never fails me), so I sat back on the train and listened as the scene was layed out: the suitors have invaded Odysseus’ household, Telemachus is still a frustrated and passive adolescent, Athena presents herself in the guise of Mentor. I zoned in and out while gazing at the strangers packed around me. I thought about my first guitar (a used Ovation with giant cracks in the top that I bought for $70 at a shop in Red Hook, New Jersey) and wondered where it was. I thought about the time Brian and I had bused it from Granada to Lagos, Portugal with a couple of girls from the Instituto Don Quijote. We spent the weekend jumping off cliffs and wandering around the surreal, rocky beach-scapes with bottles of vinho verde.
When I arrived at Liverpool Street, I texted him and he came out to meet me. There was a small party in full swing at his place… a very small party, in fact, but there was an energetic vibe flowing. I met Thea, Brian’s roommate, his friends Toby Slade-Baker and Alex Lodge, who work together at Felt Music. Toby makes some serious underground house and techno music, DJs and has a production company (http://www.living-city.co.uk). Alex, upon finding out I was a librarian by trade, expressed a devout passion for books and opened a discussion about some of our favorite authors.
Tags: Alex Lodge, Brian Leininger, El Prat, Instituto Don Quijote, Lagos, Liverpool Street Station, London, Odyssey, Ovation, Portugal, Red Hook New Jersey, Toby Slade-Baker
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
“They say it takes ten years to make your first album.”
Quite a few friends have said that exact phrase to me in the last year or two, or nearly that exact phrase, and despite my aversion to hackneyed words of wisdom, my particular story definitely supports it. It was about ten years ago that the goal of recording an album became my over-arching focus. It’s not that I started making music ten years ago. I had been singing since I was a little kid. The first song I ever remember singing was “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from the 1978 musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. That song was a huge success around the world when I was about three years old, and throughout my earliest days I used to sing it to my parents in the car and around the apartment. But it was only about ten years ago, when I was around 22, that I decided I wanted to start making albums.
It’s taken me this long, but two weeks ago I got on a plane from Barcelona to London for my first real recording sessions in the studio of Brian Leininger, sound engineer, creator of Echotrip , and personal friend of mine from my days in Granada, Spain. We met there in the summer of 2003, when we were both studying Spanish at the Instituto Don Quijote. We drank more than we studied, for sure, played songs on the rooftop of our residence hall, wandered around the Albayzín together, spent nights among the gitanos at one of the last vital holdouts of authentic flamenco in all of Andalucía.
One afternoon, on our way back into the city from a hike up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, we got lost in some thicket, and after working our way through it for half an hour, stumbled into a back wall of the Alhambra, just behind the gardens of the Generalife. We saw in front of us, heaped against a hidden rampart of the once impenetrable fortress, a refuse pile where the gardeners had obviously been dumping leaves and grass and branches for years. We climbed our way up the mucky, decaying mound and just managed to sneak over the wall and infiltrate the palace. We were only breaking into a museum, but I couldn’t help feeling like one of the soldiers of the Catholic Kings in the late 15th century. With our dirty blonde hair, Brian and I probably looked more like German mercenaries than Spaniards, but none-the-less, we shared a certain pride in our feat. If you go through something like that with a person, you’re bound to collaborate again, I guess.
Tags: Alhambra, Brian Leininger, Evita, flamenco, Granada, London, Spain
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