10.30.2006
THAT WAS SOMETHING; OTHERWISE…IT WOULDN’T BE CALLED ‘THAT’ This is typical of my post 2 all-nighters in the studio kind of prose. By harnessing Herculean effort, I managed to get Benji’s record finished, and left the studio this morning at about 8.30. Like the previous morning, I was shocked to emerge into the radiance of a nearly cloudless morning; this one was at the delicious tipping point where the heat supplants the leftover evening cool. My eyes were sensitive from staring at the monitor of the studio computer for the previous eleven hours (and that was just AFTER dinner—and includes the extra hour that the revision to standard time gave us—if only I were paid by the hour!) but that made the blazing reds, greens and yellows of the surrounding foliage all the more startling when I encountered them, magnificently backlit by the morning sun. We drove back to Benji’s house and I wrangled an hour and a half of sleep, waking with a panic when my alarm went off at ten, thinking that my flight was leaving in two hours, when in reality I had set noon in my head as the latest time we should start heading to the airport. We had time to get coffee (and a Sunday New York Times, a pleasure that my schedule rarely allows) and then made our way to Tulsa Int’l. It was empty—there was no line, and I managed to check all my crap—a bass, a guitar, a massive suitcase completely full of stuff, and a box containing the microphones that I bought while I was here (well, HALF of the microphones I bought—I bought two EV 664s on EBay and had them shipped to my Washington state mailing address—my son will have the pleasure of bringing them to me when he visits me later this year!) for only eighty five bucks. I arrived at the airport at 12.30 and by one o’clock I was at the gate. My week was spent solely in the studio, with a nightly break for dinner, and a morning stop for coffee, and if lucky, a few hours of sleep! I averaged, I’m sure, 15 hours a day. I think my longest day was 20-21 hours, long enough to drive from LA to Seattle. But, it was all in the pursuit of making a good record and in reality if it wasn’t for the fact I need to sleep now and then, I find working on music—editing vocal minutiae in Pro Tools, fiddling with reverb settings, trying to get the ultimate kick drum sound—completely enjoyable. Now I’m on the plane to Paris, and since I’ve boarded the aircraft I’ve turned 38. Traveling thru time. I am really looking forward both to being reunited with my family in Paris in a few hours, and celebrating another year of life, with them surrounding me; and then my upcoming tour as well. The dates are all final now for the November European tour, and are on myspace and probably by the time you read this on this site as well. See some of you out there soon. I want to give a very big thank you to Benji and Whitney Latham for being such wonderful hosts and mention that they are among the most decent and kind folks you’ll meet. They will be missed! Love KS United flight 942 between Chicago and Paris Postscript: I didn’t get to post this until now, the wee hours of Halloween…’ween hours, I guess. Witching hours? Anyway, I wanted to thank the many folks that wrote in with birthday greetings. I arrived, with 2/3 of my luggage (guitars are due in first thing tomorrow) and spent the day with my family, plus getting a haircut. It was simple, wonderful, and exactly what I wanted. Thanks to everyone who contributed! Love, KS, Paris.
10.22.2006
IT WASN'T JUST ME In reference to last week's disappointing coffee encounter, I found that the owner of Double Shot was indeed the man who refused to make my macchiato and that he is a very passionate coffee purist, but also has a reputation as a tightwad (macchiatos use too much milk compared to the price of the drink) and perhaps a candidate for an anger management class. I think he should roast and perhaps have people working there that enjoy, or at least tolerate, the presence of customers. I have been working hard here, pretty much I sleep, get up, have coffee, record Benji/play on Benji's record/record other people paying on Benji's record/edit, break for dinner, go back to recording, and stumble in to bed at hours uncomfortably close to being associated more with the sun than the moon. My ears are tired, I find myself walking into things a little too often. The musical ideas have been coming along wonderfully, tho. I think the songs have come to life in a real nice, unexpected way. Tonight we finished all the recording; we did vocals for three songs today. So, tomorrow, I mix. I'm going to get over 7 hours of sleep. Amazing. We had the luxury of being done before midnight and we rented a film--"Howl's Moving Castle" the most recently released film by Japanese animator Hayao Miyazki. I do believe his films are incredibly popular, but in case there are people here who haven't seen them--I can't recommend them enough. Ostensibly, the films are about magic; but also the reinforcement of qualities--courage, forgiveness, the ability to see through a person's external presentation into their most central, true selves and bring their best out of them--that ground them in a moral universe, and a believable one. The last three films released here--"Howl's", "Spirited Away", and "Princess Mononoke" are astonishing technically; other's I've seen--"Kiki's Delivery Service" and "The Castle of Cagliostro" are also enjoyable but I think the level of artwork has really been perfected in his films of the last ten years. OK, I've got to sleep now. Oh, one more thing--I just received my copy of "Hooray For L.A." by Minky Starshine and the New Cardinals, which has 6 songs that I produced/engineered etc. Great songs, great playing, etc. etc. or for more details
Love
KS
Tulsa OK
10.17.2006
SHADE GROAN This morning, we decided to get coffee at a different place than our usual stops. We worked in the studio til 5 this morning. I say we but...I was editing audio and the artist was, er, resting his voice on the studio couch. I finished editing at about 4.30 and then I backed up my files, which takes about 20 minutes. OK, so I could have been done at 4.50 but I bought a couple of microphones on EBay. EV 664's if you are interested. We've been using one here at the studio, which belonged to the proprietor's grandfather, granddad was a country picker and singer of some note and this was his live mic. I liked the sound of the thing--not super hi-fi, but very aggressive in the high mids, extremely directional (it was designed to be an announcer's mic: to accentuate the human voice's urgent frequencies and to work in environments with lots of background noise). We've used it on drums, guitars, and it did an amazing job as one of three mics I put on the Leslie cabinet (I used my Pacific Pro Audio PPA-2ube mics on the low end, and put the EV on the top, and it was very effective). Back to the coffee. We went to a palace we hadn’t tried before, called Double Shot Coffee Co., on South Boston Ave. in downtown Tulsa. We had a look around—they claim to be the most dedicated roasters in town. Ok. Concrete and metal décor. Could easily pass for a place in Seattle. So far so good. Not much to eat. A couple of slices of banana bread (take a pass on that). So, I approach the barista, a guy in his late thirties. Perhaps he was the proprietor. It’s Sunday morning, he’s unshaven, prob. been working since 7 so I relate this story with all possibly empathies. I asked for a macchiato, my coffee beverage of choice. I understood his mumbled reply to be “I don’t know how to those” –which is the usual response I get in the states when ordering a macchiato. For the record, they are just as dumbfounded when I try to order one in Paris, too. Cheerfully I started to explain how to make one, and he cut me off and said “I didn’t say I don’t know how to make one, I said I don’t make those”. I was so taken aback I didn’t have a comeback. I just spun on my heels and left. As the day went on I kept thinking about it. It occurred to me that he might have assumed that I was asking for a Starbucks-style ‘macchiato’: a caramel-infused concoction that has little to do with the Italian original it lifted the name from. To Starbucks, words like macchiato are a fancy way to say, ‘candy’. This guy prob. thought we were local yokels, and that no way would someone in Tulsa who was a coffee lover wouldn’t already be a regular, and thus we were idiots who would order one of those blizzard things that Starbucks sells as an espresso beverage. I’d tell us to FOAD, were that the case. I will go back at some point and try again, just to see what the hell he’s all about. For the record, Shades of Brown makes an excellent, Italian style, macchiato. Other than that, I have been way too busy here at the studio to really have more adventures than that. It’s a big deal if Whitney, wife of Benji, my ‘client’, can join us for dinner so we can hear some new jokes. Problem is, she works as a pediatric resident at a hospital, and a lot of the stories she has to tell are not funny. But they are fascinating—but not uplifting. Tragedies. Hey, my back up is done for the night—it’s 5.30am and I am going to get perhaps 5 hours of sleep before we start recording again. Love KS Tulsa OK
10.08.2006
SOME THINGS I'VE SORT OF LEARNED That reads just like the headlines to the columns by the stoner kid in the Onion. "Hola. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya." That guy. It's very very late, and I should be resting in preparation of tomorrow's studio time. I've been working on Benji's album. It's starting to take shape. It took most of this week to really sculpt a framework for what the songs will be built upon. But I've made some really cool sounds--most interesting are the ride cymbal hits that I pitched up an octave--I had the drummer hit a lone ride cymbal, close mic'd in stereo by a pair of PPA-2ube mics from Pacific Pro Audio in Seattle. He had recently had his mallets stolen, and thus we fashioned one--out of a drumstick and one of benji's socks (earlier I confiscated benji's and drummer Isaiah's t-shirts to cover the drums and deaden them!)--and it worked just fine. I then used the pitch shifter audio suite plug in to pitch the hits up an octave, with time correction, and they sound quite unreal. As they trail out there's some truly weird artifacts, little dark pops, that are really spooky. We've been canvassing Tulsa for its finest dining options--and I've found Tulsa has numerous examples of two of my favorites--barbecue and authentic Mexican cuisine. With that in mind, it should be no surprise that one of the best meals I had was at Legends, a barbecue place by the Latham's staffed by a Hispanic crew. You get a brownie with your meal. Meat is served by the pound. Bottomless iced tea. In fact, the night we were there the special was all-you-can-eat ribs for around ten dollars. Thing is, their regular order is already all I can eat. Driving to our morning coffee, at Shades of Brown (which is where Isaiah baristas from 6am to 1pm, all these mornings between recording included) we saw a pair off bald eagles circling above us as we drove along the river. To add the unexpectedness of that sighting, there was also one of those Mylar balloons, escaped perhaps from the Tulsa State Fair, in purple, caught in the same thermal. I have to give a heartfelt thank you to Dave P., who came and helped us sort some computer issues the other day, and Shannon who came and Super-Tech'ed, ultimately solving our issues. And my man on the set up day, Wayne. The studio we're working in is very new and the opposite of trashy; the sounds have been good and the monitoring is very pleasant and accurate. And there's wifi. Zac, the proprietor has been generous and unobtrusive. Oh, and thanks to Kelly for letting me use his Photoshop--thanks to him I put some new photos up in the photo section. And thanks to Whitney for the mints. Benji's lovely Mrs. put clean sheet on my bed and left a mint on my pillow. Or so I thought. I found out that there had actually been two, one of which was stuck to me when I woke up. And, bless her heart, Whitney changed the sheets *again* as they were all chocolate-y now. Seeing as she is a very busy resident at the pediatrics ward of a local hospital, that's a lot of extra work and I felt bad that she insisted on doing it. Bottom line is, Tulsa's good people. Love KS Tulsa OK
10.02.2006
BARBECUE AND BOTOX Well there are other things that come to mind when I land in the US but good BBQ is always on my mind, I sought some out within 12 hours of my arrival...I am going to be based out of Tulsa OK for the next 4 weeks, working with Benji Latham on his record. The night before I left I managed to sneak out and catch about 45 minutes of Radio Birdman's set at the Maroquinerie, which was excellent. Unusual looking group of folks, but that's rockers for ya. I flew to Tulsa last Thursday, stopping in Chicago for a pretty long layover, which I didn't mind at all; I got caught up on some tedious phone calling that I couldn't do practically from France (Expedia res. that needed changing, bank, usw.) There's a more than decent deli out in the F wing of O'Hare, I had a damn fine tuna salad on wheat toast--they also serve kebab, polish sausage, whatever you can think of that's a 'to go' kind of cuisine. My flight to Tulsa was delayed a bit, so I got there at about 10.30 that night. Benji picked me up, and we got me settled in to his house, and I met Ms. Benji, Whitney, and the two dogs and the cat. Being the new kid in town, the dogs were eager to make new alliances with potential food givers, so they followed me around for the first day or so...curiously, they have a dog named Abigail, which was my dog's name growing up. The first two days were rehearsal days, going over the songs for the upcoming recording, with Isaiah the drummer, Benji, and I played bass. As mentioned before, I sought out BBQ the first meal on Friday, and Elmer's ("It Be Bad") delivered the goods. I'm going back for some links ASAP. Hit a pretty good taqueria on Saturday as well. I got a new phone. My US mobile phone had met an untimely death at the end of August, but I wasn't all that sad to see it go. It was a Motorola phone, one of the small blue and silver quad band ones, and I never liked it all that much. The regular small speaker stopped working just a couple of months after I got it, so the only way I could use it is with a headset or on speaker. Anyway, I got this new device, a Nokia E76, that is Nokia's response to the Blackberry. I haven't been so enamored with a piece of technology since I got my first laptop (which was a Powerbook Duo 210 in 1993--I was writing emails from the tour bus on Eudora as early as 1994). I've been without a fully functional phone for a month, which was a fine vacation, but now it's good to be able to call anyone, anytime. Yes, I have a French mobile too; it's pay as you go and just for Dominique and me to communicate with. TULSA 9/30 Benji, at my urging, put together a gig for us at a small, incredibly tidy bar called Uncle Bently's (there's no second 'e' in Bently in this case, which I didn't know til we pulled up to it!). Tulsa's bar scene favors cover bands etc. They do indie shows in abandoned warehouses, house parties etc. and there's a few music venues for touring acts--well, one that I could find, Cain's, which is very large; The surviving members of Alice In Chains were playing there this night; The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are coming to it soon. So, Benji had trouble finding a sympathetic venue for us, but this worked out just fine. Benji played 2 sets, for a total of at least 2 hours, with me occasionally joining him on bass; I played in the middle for about an hour, and got up towards the end for a couple of more songs. Hey, we even got paid a little something--and then-- ST. LOUIS 10/1 --I got up 2 hours after I went to bed, and incredibly, Benji was willing to take me to the airport for my 7.30 flight to St. Louis. I had a pretty lame coffee, but was pleased to pick up the Sunday New York Times (to get this in Paris involves a half hour metro ride each way and a 13 euro newsstand price!!). I didn't even sleep on the plane, but watch the dawn erupt over the flat green countryside. I got to St. Louis and somehow my bass turned out to be AWOL. Oh well. I went to the hotel, and they didn't have a record of my reservation. Oh well. It got sorted out, and I went to my room to hide for a while. My bass was located, having arrived on my flight, but somehow having been mislaid on the way to baggage claim. I was there to play with Big Star, at a free music festival that also featured the Roots and Son Volt. We played at 5pm, which I couldn't have been happier about. It was extremely mellow, the sun was bright (and in my eyes) and the sky was vibrant blue. I pleasantly rediscovered how much I love October. Afterwards, I found some BBQ ribs at the food fair, and watched the Roots for a while. I had dinner with Alex and some other friends, and when I got back to the hotel, eager to hit the wifi, I instead went face down on the bed from 10pm until 8 this morning. I'm going to head back to Tulsa pretty soon. A lot of work ahead--tonight I'll rest and prepare, and tomorrow we dig into it. No doubt drawing strength from some brisket! Love KS St. Louis MO Currently enjoying: Aretha’s cover of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’
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The latest release by Ken Stringfellow is a split EP with Spain's Muy Fellini, featuring never-heard-before music incl. Ken's take on Bob Dylan, released by
King of Patio records
in Spain on Oct 8, 2009.
Order it directly from Muy Fellini here www.myspace.com/muyfellini
10" VINYL ONLY!!!
older news :
8/3/2003
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