GRAY. BLUE. RIGHT. MINKY.
I have gotten to know Rhode Is. a little more intimately than I did before...spending the week in the studio with Minky, producing several tracks for this artist...6 songs were recorded at the UFO Soundlabs, which occupies several rooms in a sprawling old factory/mill on the western edge of Providence. Equipment-wise it was a little bare (people keep stealing all his good stuff!!) but we borrowed a couple of things and I have to say, it's prob. the best recording I've done, engineering from the ground up. No small contribution was made by the Shiny Box ribbon mix I used on the drums, assembled by a chum of mine from the Seattle area; by chance this mic had been discovered and purchased by the bass player on these sessions, Chris Cugini, and he brought it along just in case. Quite just, in this case! Actually, every muso who played really did an outstanding job and made my job easy--the rhythm secion of Chris, with drummer Paul Myers; keyboard player Phil Aiken; pedal steel/lap steel/dobro genius Adam Ollendorff; vocalist Larissa Maestro; our friend Kurt Friel played mandolin on a song; and of course, Minky hisself. I played some guitar, keyboards, the tambourine (my speciality) and did some gatling-gun backing vocals. Working like this, time goes very fast. There was time to take a dinner break each night, and stop for coffee in the morning. And sleep. It pissed down rain like you wouldn't believe for most of the week, so no tennis in the mornings--yesterday was beautiful but we were too burnt to take advantage of the gorgeous weather. I never even opened my tennis bag! However, I did get to have dinner with my former booking agent Meggean Ward, who lives in Providence and thus I hadn't seen for a couple of years; and I managed to sort out my visa for Japan with the assistance of the Japanese consulate in Boston. If you're ever in the financial district in Boston, near the Federal Reserve Building--by a fenced off construction site in front of an office building with a Starbucks, right there on Atlantic Ave., look for a homeless guy, a black man, sitting by the fence. He's the friendliest guy...buy him lunch if you can.
Thanks also to Derrick Martin at UFO Soundlabs for giving the sessions a great home--plus Derrick 2 and Tom for their assistance. And, don't forget to say "Grace".
Love
KS
North Kingstown, RI
