All the trim and baseboards have been installed. The rooms have been painted and now I am waiting on the final inspection so I can finally get all my stuff moved in and set up.
On a two week tour with Greycoats to the big apple and back. Will return at the end of the month...
Notice the TWO pillars!!!
Back in January I was asked to stop by the studio for the drum tracking of the band North. They were considering me as the producer of the album. The drum tracks were finished and after a few weeks of jostling a few things around the project was officially in my hands. Since then we have poured over the right instruments for the right parts and the best sounds we could get for each, not to mention a name change (we're now called Greycoats). Now, eight months later the project is finished and I am thrilled. Since this is more of an art-rock band I was able to take some production liberties and add some really interesting instruments that I have acquired over the years...
A couple weeks ago my friends Ben Rosenbush and Faith Miller came in to the studio to add the beauty of real strings to the Tim Lemmens project. They played on four songs. Two of them I had done string arrangements for, which they just played and the other two were more improvised. I love the richness that strings bring to a song. These two came in and played all over the Caitlyn Smith album Face Over Heels and I just had to ask them back again. Tim was in the holy land for a couple weeks, came back and went full speed ahead into camp season and we will be reuniting next week to finish tracking. Hope to be done mixing in August. In the meantime I have been mixing the greycoats record and couldn't be more excited. More to come...
The other album I am producing right now is a band called greycoats. Formerly known as North, the band called me up looking for someone to produce their project. They had recorded this album in it's entirety at another studio on their own and decided (after restructuring many of the songs) to take it again, this time with a producer. Since they are long time acquaintances of mine and have used me to record/mix other projects they have worked on it seemed to be a natural fit. Greycoats also found themselves in need of a bass player and I decided it was a good time in my life to step into a more serious performing group. The drums, Rhodes and piano were recorded back in January at a studio just four blocks from Two Pillars called Fur Seal. Back at Two Pillars Jon, the singer/guitarist has been tracking guitar and vocals, I tracked all the bass, their keyboard player, Titus came in and sorted through all the keyboard parts he laid down at Fur Seal and the drummer, Mike came in to play shakers, tambourine, and jingle bells. They have a song called "Spiritual," which needed some interesting rhythm tracks. We decided to record these tracks outside since it fit the feel of the song. Mike recorded the stamping of his feet on the pavement, banging a hammer on a metal pipe and dropping a handful of heavy chains on the ground in rhythm to the song. Since they had recorded many parts for the album already and wanted to utilize some of those tracks, Jon brought in a media disc filled with cello parts, marching bass drum, bells, accordion, clarinet and er-hu. The only problem was that the tempo changed on a couple of the songs. Since it was only off by 2-3 beats per minute I was able to time stretch the audio without changing the pitch and line them up. I am still surprised at how good it sounds after taking such an audio beating as time-stretching. Greycoats has more of a brit-rock feel. Imagine Morrisey singing Coldplay songs with the back up band of Sigur Ros, with the overall musical direction by Thom Yorke.
My girlfriend and I just returned from Slovakia. It was one part vacation, one part work. On the vacation side of it we got to see Bratislava, Vienna and Prague. The Save the Cookie album "Phantastic" has been released all over Slovakia and we spent a couple days shooting a music video for the song "My Music." I was blown away by the quality, as it is easily comparable to any high-budget music video I have seen on this side of the pond. In the video I play a big record label executive and am signing a contract with them. As I push the contract towards them a gust of wind blows all the contract papers around the room. I freeze in time and the camera will circle around me (a la the Matrix) with the papers floating through the air. It was really fun to be a part of it. We also took some time in the studio to write a new song for their next record. The song is called Sugartown and after we finished writing it I produced Monika's vocals, like I did back in August when I was there last. We're going to keep writing music from opposite sides of the world and when they are ready to record again, Monika will either fly to America to work in my studio or I will return to Bratislava. Be sure to check out Save the Cookie at www.savethecookie.eu. Hopefully the video will be available soon on their site or on youtube.
Last week I was working on the Tiny Tree Triumph project and Brian wanted a choir of voices behind one part of the latest song "Flashlight." Several of our friends joined us and including myself we had six people singing. We multiplied our voices on several tracks so it sounded like a larger group than we really were. The background vocals turned out really great and I had to bring my camera in and snap a couple shots seeing as how this was the largest group I'd had in the studio at one time. That is... until yesterday. My partner, Bruce Balgaard, did a favor for his daughter Amanda and her Chamber Singers group and invited them in to the studio to record a whopping 23 a cappella songs. There were at one time eighteen high school students in the tracking room, easily beating the old record of six! It was really a treat to hear and capture the voices of these talented young singers in their element. We captured a beautiful natural reverb by sticking a couple of microphones out in the hallway. It sounded like they were singing in a large church. Nice to know the tracking room is big enough to record a vocal ensemble of eighteen and even nicer to know that the control room can hold the same eighteen for listening to the playback.
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This past fall I had the distinct pleasure of co-producing/mixing Roger Flyer's latest musical contribution to the world, "Songs Hidden in Eggs." This was an all-star cast comprised of Peter Ostroushko, Dan Newton (both from from A Prairie Home Companion), Jessy Greene (Wilco), Joel Hanson (PfR), and was co-produced by my friend Ben Kyle (Romantica). The CD was recorded at various studios around town with a vast array of different players and it was my job to take all these sounds and make one cohesive album. You never know if you like your own work until months after it is released and you find yourself popping it into the CD player and actually enjoying it instead of critiquing it!
Jonathan Rundman and I have become good friends. We toured the midwest together in 2005 for the Monsters of Folk tour. We have also done a bit of studio work together. He came to my studio one day armed with an external hard drive FILLED with old songs recorded and released years and years ago and asked me to re-tool, re-track and mix many of them for a remixed, best-of CD, which was released in 2007. It got great reviews and one of the songs was featured in one of Paste Magazine's CD samplers. Since then Jonathan has been in my studio to track one full band song and has also given me several more oldie-but-goodie songs to remix. It is always a real treat to work with him.
For the entire month of August I traveled to Bratislava, Slovakia to write music and lyrics for and co-produce an album for my very good friends who are in a band called Save the Cookie. After returning to the states in September they continued to finish and mix the album. In December they went into a production studio and did some filming for a few of their songs. Listed below is a live, in-studio performance video of the song called "Who I Am," which features my friend Steffon (a.k.a Snoogz) who came into my studio after I returned to record an original rap. I uploaded the file to my iDisk and they inserted it into their session. It is becoming increasingly cool to me that I can record someone in Minneapolis, upload the file and have it placed in the song on the other side of the world on the same day! The other is an actual video for another song called "Great Divide." Both songs (and versions of the songs featured in the videos) are what you can expect to hear on the upcoming album. Enjoy!
