the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
Sometimes bloggers just get on a roll. Sometimes people who blog on myspace get lost in Myspace. Trip Wamsley’s myspace blog is far too entertaining just for myspace. Trip, cross post to a proper blog thing, so more peoples can read your excellent rantings and ravings.
Go and have a read, it’s a wonderful insight into a world where endless creativity and benign insanity meet.
So we’re finally getting round to listening through and editing the tracks for the Steve and Lobelia album. Very little is needing to be done to it, thanks to the fact that we recorded it during a ‘house’ concert at Powerbase Studio in Wisner Nebraska, which has the most amazing live room, and the recording equipment is top class. Dan Kane, the owner of the studio and engineer on the tracks did an amazing job, especially considering these are just two track recordings. You can tell that we’re at the end of a tour, as we’re both playing really well, and the looped vocal stuff is particularly special. There’s also a really great live take of MMFSOG and an all-fretless version of Jimmy James that I’m partlcularly pleased with…
You can hear two tracks from the recordings already, one on my myspace page and one on lobelia’s, though I’m not sure that the version of Black Hole Sun will make it onto it, purely because the logistics of releasing cover versions on albums that are going to be downloadable is a total nightmare.
Anyway, hopefully we’ll have it all edited in the next couple of hours, and then we can work out a strategy for releasing it… what fun!
With musicians and listeners alike realising just how useless and archaic the MySpace interface is, a host of other options are springing up for musicians looking for an audience, and audiences looking for new music. One of the best ones I’ve found recently is Reverb Nation – I saw it a while ago when Seth Horan moved his mailing list over to it, and then today, the lovely Lo. re-alerted me to its existence, in relation to how it can be placed on one’s facebook page. So i created a profile, added the facebook plugin thingie, and away we go. It’s looking good.
So Greenbelt – another fab weekend. This year’s them was ‘Heaven In Ordinary’ – I didn’t like it when they suggested it last year, but it’s what Greenbelt is, an ordinary world full of heavenly loveliness. At least, it is for those of us who’ve been going there for years and know a million people (bit tougher for those peeps who are there for the first time and spend the weekend meeting a million new peoples…)
Anyway, we got there thursday evening, set up the tent.
Friday was spent catching up with friends and getting ready for the first gig of the weekend that both Lo. and I were playing at – a mainstage set with Sarah Masen. The first nice surprise was how well bands are looked after on mainstage – lots of lovely roadies and stage managers sorting everything out. Good peoples. The set went really well – was a whole lot of fun, and the crowd was HUGE for a first-band-on. Sarah sang beautifully. All good nothing bad.
The best thing about that was that we then had the rest of the night off, and were able to see a bit of Over The Rhine, and then all of Billy Bragg’s set. He was, as expected, outstanding. Funny, engaging, moving, all good things. Couple of great new songs, fab versions of old songs. He just confirmed why he’s one of my favourite live acts in the whole world, and one of my favourite guitarists too.
Onto Saturday, which started as Friday ended, with Billy Bragg, doing a talk about the campaign for a British Bill of Rights. Interesting stuff, if not without some unanswered questions (especially his attachment to the notion of a new inclusive english national pride to replace the cynical racist nastiness of the BN/P et al.)
Anyway, that was great, fascinating stuff. Following that was The Rising – Martyn Joseph’s songwriters in the round session that he does every year – fascinating stuff as usual, with BB, Amy Wadge and the bloke from Willard Grant…
After that much mellowness ensued, hanging with friends, eating lovely food, until it was time to get ready for a busy evening, firstly my gig with Ric Hordinski and then the Recycle Collective. Always a highlight of Greenbelt for me, the RC gig was a blinder, featuring me, Lo, Ric, Andrea Hazell and Patrick Wood. Much lovely music followed, and Patrick in particular was on incredible form. A real triumph.
Sunday was meant to be my mellow day, but after the previous night’s gig, Ric asked if I’d play with him again in the Performance Cafe, and I’m v. glad I did, as it was probably the best gig we did – we rocked! Great reaction from the Performance Cafe crowd too.
After that I was supposed to be compering but managed to delegate and get some time off for buying fairtrade shoes and hanging out with lovelies again. Got to see Sarah Masen play solo in the Perf. Cafe (aside from a couple of song with the lovely lady vocalistes) and she sounded great, as did Emily Barker who was on before her.
Late nights at GB are spent in the Organic Beer Tent – friendships are made, beer is drunk and the world is put right.
Monday was back to more gigs – I was compering in the Perf. Cafe, and got to introduce one of my highlights of the weekend – Nizar Al-Issa (though I got his name wrong on the intro – sorry, Nizar!) – he’s a singer and oud player, and a really great musician. Beautiful haunting music.
After him was Lo and I doing our main duo gig, playing to a nice full tent of peoples, and we played pretty well. Lo’s piano songs being especially great.
after that I got to see another one of my highlights – Beth Rowley, a fantastic singer with an amazing band (it helps that her guitarist and drummer, paul and phil wilkinson are two of my favouritest musicians anywhere). Really great stuff.
the evening was spent watching first Iain Archer, then Duke Special on the mainstage – both long time faves of mine, and both on fine form, playing to a huge crowd who loved them muchly. The headliners on the night were of no interest to me, so we headed for the beer tent. After being there an hour, Lo and I got a call asking us to go and play the late night cabaret (playing to about 1500 people)… after 2 pints… hmmm, we did it, and pulled it off. ‘Twas a little ragged, but fine.
And thus ended another great greenbelt. Now it’s time to buy a load of the talks I missed as downloads.
See you there next year!
Been having a bit of a geeky time with my website of late, and thanks to the Google IPN, I’ve been able to add a feed from this blog to the front page of my website – so you can go to www.stevelawson.net and see there at a glance if I’ve updated the blog. You’ll also see there, in the bottom right hand corner of the page, a feed from my Jaiku mini-blog, which also aggregates feeds from my normal blog, my myspace blog, my Flickr page AND a feed from my stumbleupon account for websites that I’ve favourited – so if you just want one feed that’ll bring together everything that I blog about and post all over the place,
this is another one of those things that are part and parcel of the lives of almost every working bassist on the planet – they spend their time learning songs to play with different bands or artists… except me. I very rarely have to learn songs, given that most of the time i’m playing either my own songs, or improvising.
So this week is both a challenge and a joy, as I’m learning not one but two sets to play with singers next week.
First up is Ric Hordinski AKA Monk. Ric and I first met, I think, on a gig we shared in LA about 5 years ago, where we were both playing solo. Since then we’ve stayed in touch, and I’ve been trying to get him over for Greenbelt. Finally, this year, he’s coming to play! hurrah! And in celebration of that, we’ve got a gig at Darbucka next Wednesday. It’s a double bill with Ric’s trio (with me on bass, hence the song learning) and my duo with Lobelia (much more usual Stevie-Fare, with lots of looped bass and vocal loveliness on songs mostly written by Lo.) Gigs in August are notoriously poorly attended (everyone’s on holiday and doin’ the festival thang, y’see), so if you can, PLEASE come out and see us play! It’ll be a fab show, with proper songs ‘n’ everything! :o)
The second set is with Sarah Masen, which is particularly enjoyable as I’ve been a big fan of Sarah’s music since her first album came out in the mid 90s, and love the way she writes both music and words. We’re learning these songs for a mainstage set at Greenbelt on Friday, which i’m rather looking forward to…
So I think I’ve got 16 songs to learn… oh, and a bass ‘n’ voice arrangement of a Bond theme to do before Greenbelt as well, for a more secretive show… more on that after it’s happened!
And for your listening pleasure, here are some Myspace links to hear what’s in store…
Ric/Monk
Sarah Masen
Lobelia
Me (inc. one tune with Lo.)
enjoy!
(why do I feel like I’ve used that blog title before? Perhaps it’s because I’m listening to King’s X at the moment, and that’s where the title comes from…)
Anyway! The reason for it is to compare Facebook and MySpace – my Myspace page has about 8.5 thousand friends, maybe 4-500 of whom i’ve met at some point, and probably a 1000 I know who they are… My Facebook page currently has 175 friends, and I’ve met all but about 6 of them, and those I know through online connections.
In the past when I’ve advertised gigs on MySpace, I’ve had a response from about 10 or so people… Most of those are people who would probably have come to the gig anyway, and were just reminded to do so by the mailout.
On Facebook, i recently set up a page for my gig on the 22nd with Lobelia and Monk, and we’ve already got 7 confirmed attending, and about 24 who ‘might be’ attending… Percentage-wise, that’s so far off the charts of anything MySpace can get close to, with the kind of friends-list that I’ve got… Time to thin the herd, methinks, though it might actually be a lot quicker and easier to just launch a new myspace page and start again… Watch this space.
Anyway, Facebook (assuming it doesn’t get shut down in the current law suit) is a FAR better design, and much more pleasurable waste of time than MySpace…let’s see how it develops for musicians…
Had a most enjoyable gig this evening, with Luca Sirianni and Davide Giovannini – it was at Smolenski’s on the Strand, so was a restaurant gig – quite an upmarket restaurant gig, but people were still eating while we played in the background. Anyway, it’s Luca’s gig, but he’s pretty open with what we can do, so lots of lovely improv ensued, including a couple of things i hope I can still remember tomorrow cos they’ll turn into new tunes. Harmonically we’re able to get into some great places, as Luca tends to play quite high guitar parts, and has a clearer more trebley sound that most jazzers, which means that we can get away with being more ‘out’ without it really clashing. We did a mad version of Summertime to close the gig, which went all over the place, all with a rather lovely R ‘n’ B groove… much fun.
When i got home, I found in my inbox one of those lovely emails that really makes you think – it was from a musician friend I deeply admire and respect, taking me to task for being particularly uncharitable about Babyshambles in a post a few months back. His email was friendly and encouraged me to check out what the musicians in the band are up to, given that his experience of them has been really positive, both to listen to and play with… I like it when people throw things into the mix that mess with how I previously saw things. I find it very difficult to get past Doherty’s public persona and the nonsense of watching someone completely wasted trying to play – it’s bad enough when it’s someone you know is a genius, let alone when it’s someone who thus far has seemingly failed spectacularly to produce any art that justifies the level of exposure and interest he’s been getting… (I’m really glad that I’ve never seen any of the footage of when Coltrane used to be so spaced on Heroin that he would fall asleep on the bandstand, or John Martyn being so drunk he couldn’t stand up… As much as I’m aware of how geniuses are capable of ruining things with drugs, I generally find it too painful to watch – it always amazes me when bassists tell me they love the Jaco Pastorius tuitional video when to me it’s a heartbreakingly tragic document of a once-incredible musician failing to remember even the most iconic of his own compositions, and generally falling apart on screen. But once again, i digress). So anyway, as a result of my being irked by Doherty, and finding what I have heard of the band making no memorable impression on me whatsoever beyond sounding largely derivative, I hadn’t really listened in any great depth, given that there’s plenty of music that does connect with me that I could spend that time with, and nothing had previously given me cause to investigate.
But now it’s there, so next time something Babyshambles-ish comes up, I’ll give it a listen with fresh ears, and be less quick to dismiss what they do… I really hope there’s something there that grabs me – certainty in music isn’t really a quality I require or enjoy, and neither is disliking particular music – people who wear their distain for particular things like a badge of honour come across as unbearably smug, and I’ve nothing to gain by not liking or liking Babyshambles, so I’ll have another listen, at some point, and report back. For now though, I’ll take back my earlier blog comments about the band and reserve judgement (as if they give a shit what I think anyway… and neither should they!)
All kinds of exciting gig booking news today – first up, on August 22nd, I’ll be back playing at Darbucka for the first time this year, in my duo with Lobelia and also with Monk aka Ric Hordinski – Ric is a stunning guitarist, a former member of Over The Rhine, has produced records for people like Phil Keaggy and David Wilcox and made a stack of amazing records under the Monk moniker.
I played a show with Ric in LA a few years ago that was a whole lot of fun, and a whole lot of great music, and I tracked some fun noises for his new instrumental record when I was in Cincinnati on this last tour in the US.
The duo with Lobelia is one of the most exciting and fun musical projects I’ve had in ages, and you can hear some of what that sounds like on my myspace page and on her myspace page too.
So that’s gig #1.
Also this evening I’ve booked Patrick Wood and Andrea Hazell to come and play with the Recycle Collective at Greenbelt – both are Recycle regulars, stunning improvisors and just all-round amazing musicians.
AND, as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve booked Andrea, and am just waiting for confirmation from Cleveland Watkiss for the Recycle gig on the 6th September at The Vortex – how exciting!
Lots of great gig news fo’ sho’. :o)
Go and put them in your diaries now, you lovely london peoples.
After collecting my car this morning, most of today has been spent recording. Having turned the living room into a remote studio, I spent the day recording tracks for an album by LeeSun – a lovely quirky singer/songwriter from Leeds. She initially invited me to go and record with her in Canada back in June, but it was slap bang in the middle of my US tour with L, so sadly I couldn’t do it (how much fun would that have been??), but I offered to do the tracks remotely when she got back, so that’s what I’m doing, in my lil’ studio here. It’s a fun way to work, being engineer and tea-boy as well as musician, and it means I can quickly do multiple versions of a line and send them over to be checked out. This evening I was able to send some MP3 roughs of what I’d been up to over to LeeSun and chat via MSN about what she wanted – very useful. The wonders of the internet. Fortunately, she really likes what I’ve done with the songs – they’re lovely songs, and right up my street – so we’ll go ahead with the rest of the album.
I’m hoping to do more of this kind of work – it’s a great way to be involved in projects that normally couldn’t afford to a) get me to where the recording is happening or b) even afford time in a big studio anyway. This way, I can do it in my studio in a way that suits the budget of the artist/producer, and everyone’s happy. Good for keeping my carbon footprint down as well, i guess, not driving to studios all over the place…
If you’re reading this and you’ve got a project you want me to play on, please do send me an email with some details about the project and you’re budget, and we’ll sort something out.
