Category: Musicology
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Pharaoh made Ra angry
Spent most of the day in the studio at Goody Sound, mixing two more songs from the record. I posted them both to Soundcloud last night and the first one has nine listens so far and the second has 137. Go figure. Moses Took Us to the Water “Moses Took Us to the Water” (I…
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Balm in Gilead
Presidents’ Day is a federal holiday and for me this means I am back in the studio with my producers (David and Jeremy), working right now on the preliminary mix for “Moses Took Us to the Water.”
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amanaplanacana
I hope to release my record, No One Does It Solo Only, later this year, maybe a little sooner if I suddenly have a lot of unstructured time on my hands, and anyhow true to the title of the record, the process of releasing it will be a team effort just as the songwriting, arranging,…
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What a lot of people forget about the 80s
For nearly a year there smack in the middle of that decade of excess nobody was permitted to mess with anybody’s toot-toot. Jello remembered, thirty years later…
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I wonder why I wonder
We managed to squeeze in a second mixing session last month (January 13, 2025). I wasn’t able to get to Oakland for this session, so I “phoned it in” (well, zoomed it in, I guess) and that seemed to work out just fine. (Produced by David Gans and Jeremy Goody. Recorded, engineered, and mixed by…
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It’s time to close
Almost caught up now. We managed two mixing sessions last month (produced by David Gans and recording and mixing engineer Jeremy Goody at Goody Sound Studio). The first was on Saturday, January 4, 2025. Dirty Ol’ Sunshine We revisited the rough mix of “Dirty Ol’ Sunshine” which we last touched in June of 2023 (!),…
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Ain’t so sure that I could tell you when
We managed to schedule one more studio date last year, on December 6, to mix down tracks for No One Does It Solo Only. I had my knee replacement in November. Did I mention that? Maybe that’s worth a blog post too at some point, but anyhow it wasn’t really possible for me to get…
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The mixdown
Naturally, there is a learning curve to recording an album. Of course there are more than one way to do that as well, but the way I am doing mine has gone something like this so far: So anyhow, as noted above we started the preliminary mixing last November 13, getting two of the track…
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I surrender, I surrender!
We got back into the studio (at last!) on October 21, 2024, as “Down to the Mountain” completed its evolution from string-band ditty to secular gospel roof-raiser. Down to the Mountain We met for a rare evening recording session at Goody Sound to get these harmony vocals added to “Down to the Mountain.” Lorna Kollmeyer,…
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Hacking time
As I’ve gotten older like everyone else I have noticed how time speeds up. Each new days is a smaller fraction of your life than the previous one. A summer that lasted a lifetime when you were nine passes in the blink of an eye when you are 50. But there is a positive side!…
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And you can sing along
Because of a variety of scheduling vicissitudes (some good, some less so, but all’s well that ends well) we got back to Goody Sound last week with singer Lorna Kollmeyer, who added her voice to three of the songs on the record (with more to come, stay tuned). Side note: I sing all twelve tunes…
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The new phonebook is here!
I was unwinding on Friday afternoon near the end of a long week and tuned into Human Music with Bill the Cat on Humboldt Hot Air, coming soon to actual airwaves near you (if you live near Humboldt, one would assume). As expected (disclosure: I am long time fan of Bill’s deejaying, mixtape, and playlist…
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We all got drownded
Playing around with short clips, I recorded the first verse of “Moses” a capella, the second with just percussion, the next few on acoustic ukulele, the few after that on the same acoustic plugged into an app, and the final verse on my electric uke. Recorded over the course of several days and then stitched…
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Dirty ol’ lie
Quick reel from October 4 with my electric ukulele and a looper.
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It’s not about you, man
Then on September 30, I recorded this live version of “Saint Lucifer,” which started off (and still is, when I play it solo) a Dylanesque folk song with a hook vaguely reminiscent of Casey Jones. It has evolved, on the record, into more of a rocker.
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News is fake and the world is flat
and a junkie’s in the alley with a baseball bat! (Sep 26 2024)
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Cigarettes and Skoal
For the record, I know the signature drink at Pedro’s was the kamikaze, but hurricanes scanned better. (Recorded September 22, 2024.)
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He didn’t get it from the wind
This is one of the last tunes I wrote for the album and in some ways it’s my favorite, in that it doesn’t really imitate a specific stye or other type of song, exactly, though the other day I wondered if maybe it was a bit influenced by mid-70s Floyd stuff like “Wish Your Were…
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Don’t tell me all your secrets, talking crow!
This song, “Down to the Mountain,” is made from some of the oldest ingredients. On the album it has developed into a kind of secular gospel tune but when I play it solo, as I did here on September 19, 2024, it’s still bog-standard string-band stylee:
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Verdigris and indigo
I was in the midst of writing”The Long Haired Kings” when I first went into the studio to start working on the album, so we tackled it first. Here’s a live version from September 16, 2024:
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A scientist’s dream
Since “Giving Zoo Wolves Lessons in Music” is something of a jam-oriented song, I thought it would be fun to work up a loop (with a bass ukulele, then a baritone ukulele, then an amplified acoustic concert ukulele) before singing and playing the song and taking some solos on an electric ukulele. It’s long enough…