LOGRONO, 5/3
For the last show of the tour, we were pretty tired, but in buoyant spirits. The sound on stage was a little weird, so for the first few songs I struggled to find my singing pitch but got settled in eventually. We interspersed nearly every lyric with references to our support act’s drummer, who organized these shows, Edu Ugarte. Partially to razz him, and partially because ‘Edu Ugarte’ is really fun to say. Things like singing the Police’s “De Do Do De Da Da Da” as “Edu Du Du, Ugar ga te” and many more elaborate schemes. To add to the fun, we altered many lyrics, of songs we pulled out of the air or the Posies songs in the set, so include the story, which is true, that Edu dates the sister of his bandmate Juan. We had lots of fun with that in a surreal riff on “Rocky Raccoon” that I am sure left Posies fans scratching their heads and any casual onlookers completely in the dust. We did play our songs seriously too. But the mood was not somber. Another guy, whom we remembered as a crazy dancer from our 2007 full band show in the same town, was moved to stomp his booted feet and bounce up like a dolphin at Seaworld at feeding time (thhis was a jazz club, so tables and chairs in forn t of us, so he was REALLY sticking out)--when I say stomped his booted feet, he was slamming out Morse code punctuation to the music--and then at other times he couldn’t control himself and would shoot up to standing position and put his hands in the air and writhe and wriggle. His girlfriend was laughing, sort of bewildered but you couldn’t help but enjoy his ability to let the spirit move him.
For a Sunday, the show was quite late, I don’t think we got out of there before 2am. And at 5.30 I was up, to be in the lobby by 6.30, when Angel, a friend from the 2007 show, had offered to pick me up and drive for the hour or so drive to Bilbao, where he works twice a week. I watched the dramatic landscape go by under low hanging clouds--it was surprisingly lights considering it was 6.30 and overcast, so it was strange and beautiful, the hills, and later, massive crags that we drove through to get to Bilbao. We never spoke, and listened to a live Wilco show he had in his CD player. Traffic came to a standstill in Bilbao, and it was starting to make us both really stressed, but we didn’t say anything! But, we had built in an extra 30 minutes (the drive w/o traffic should be an hour, but I gave it 1.5) so I was dropped at the terminal at 8.05, exactly one hour before my flight, plenty of time to check in.
My travel was long: first I flew to Barcelona; waited two hours, and flew to Oslo; waited two hours and flew to Tromso. Having left the hotel at 6.30, I landed in Tromso 14 hours later. And went directly to work. I was in Tromso to produce an EP for
Pernille Sparboe, whom I’ve met at the Disciplines’ appearances in Tromso last year. Pernille is a very shiny and fresh young woman, very kind and very positive. By appearances you would prob. guess that is she is a few years younger than she is, and you might think she is a fashionable college student. She looks like a hipper version of the small town girl that she actually is. But there is much more to her than appearances. She is of course very bright, and quick to laugh (a good quality). By day she is a police investigator, and has worked the street beat as well--so she has seen dead bodies, murderers, domestic violence, etc etc. This seems to have only reinforced her ability to stay optimistic and be of service to her community. And when she sings, if you are expecting girly--you would be dead wrong. She sings with a rich, soulful, powerful voice...reminds me a bit of Carrie Akre but perhaps even more R & B, even tho’ her music is not funky per se, but it’s delivered with mountains of soul. I knew her demos, acoustic guitar and voice, and with a band behind her powerful enough to match her dynamic (her acoustic guitar by itself didn’t stand a chance versus a voice like that) the results are really stunning.
At this preproduction rehearsal, I had a chance to hear the band better than the few youtube videos I’d seen from her shows. Espen the drummer; Frank the guitarist; and Hogman the bass player. E & H had played in a very 90s-rock (STP/AiC/Candlebox) style band called
Hangface that spent some years living the dream in the USA. Living the dream means working with legendary engineer
Eddie Kramer, touring casinos nationwide with Pat Benatar, dating Miss Norway, this kind of thing. So, the guys were young but had been to school, as it were. So they had great feel and great chops--that American thing had rubbed off on them, I think. So, in the rehearsal my suggestions were quite minimal. They made good choices, and played tight, and we simply adjusted a few small things--a drum fill here & there, etc.
The studio we were working in was put together by a local music visionary (who used to book Briskeby’s shows in Norway) and Jon Marius, whom you might recall as the engineer/collaborator for the Disciplines album. It’s in a building that looks a heckuvalot like an old mental hospital--nobody seemed to know what it used to be. But it had a nice big room and within that room a control room and an isolation booth had been built, and the rest of the space was open, very high ceilings, with no parallel walls, and lots of ducts and other things making the space random (this is good for sound--you don’t want featureless, parallel walls in a recording space. Go clap your hands in an empty house and you’ll see why--you get rapid, bizarre sounding echoes, esp. near the corners). They have tastefully assembled a great collection of equipment, so working here was a breeze. Jon Marius was my engineer for the first day, the difficult day when everyone played live together--lots of channels to put together, lots of headphone mixes to make for the different musicians, etc. After that, I pretty much had the hang of it and was able to work on my own. So, the first day we got the basic sounds and did two songs, with the bass/drums/guitar all live. The second day we did two more songs and then electric guitar overdubs. There was a hilarious episode where I had to try and coax/coerce/inspire/force Frank to play in simple, bluesy style. He had way too much Steve Lukather in him. After awhile, it was like “Play like a moron! Imagine you have 4 notes to play in the entire song, and you don’t know where they should go but if you play in the wrong places your family will be killed!” That actually worked--til he played some crappy L.A. jazz lick and I had to tell him he lost a cousin, but the fat one who picks his nose and nobody liked anyway. In the end even I had to play one or two guitar licks...it’s hard to go back to simple after you learn to be a virtuoso. So I never learned that...
On those first two days, since the musicians had day jobs, we worked from 6pm til maybe 2 or 3 in the morning. On the third day, Thursday, we worked from 3pm til 4am. Just Pernille and I, doing all her vocals and her acoustic and electric guitar parts. The last thing we recorded was an insane harmony on an already insane vocal part...we were trying to figure out what it could be and we were going crazy trying it...finally we got it tho. I think! It was hard to tell at that point.
With all that done, what was left was vocal editing and keyboards, and I had determined that my home set up was actually better suited for what remained. So we didn’t end up working on Friday. I slept off the 13 hour work day, and in the evening we went to see a kind of play, a performance of a poem, ‘Fever’ by Knut Hamsun, set with action and singing and bizarre movements and set pieces. Of course it was in Norwegian but you could get the gist (a screen also showed lines from the piece in English and German occasionally). There is a female role, hard to describe but theme of the poem is a man who loses a woman’s love and goes thru rage, despair, all the rollercoaster of emotions, but being Hamsun, it’s dark and he generally is in a violent, hateful rage. The woman is somewhere between sprite and ghost...making strange movements and noises, and always being remote, otherworldly. The role was created uniquely by
Anneli Drecker, who is Jon Marius’ girlfriend, well more than girlfriend--they are not married but have children & live together. She’s from Tromsø and that’s how they came to live there now. So, she is a regular performer at all kinds of high art things in the area, and this particular piece was a perfect showcase for her unique talents. She squeaks and chirps, and her face contorts and pantomimes. And she sings. She has the gift of pure, perfect tone and pitch. Pure enough to be hallucinogenic, really! So, the production, the staging, etc. of the piece was most interesting, but Anneli’s voice was the star of the show, really, at least for me.
On Saturday I flew to Oslo, to spend some time recording on a very intense project, organized by Street Magazine (similar to UK’s Big Issue or Seattle’s Real Change), featuring songs written and performed by the magazine’s sellers, who are homeless. Many are drug addicts, or suffering from other forms of dysfunction. But the magazine’s staff managed to get them into a studio (imagine trying to organize a recording date with someone who has no phone, no address, and a set of priorities that don’t involve a music career). The results are rather what you might think--sincere, ragged, sometimes haunting, sometimes just right on, and sometimes, right out there. I played piano and sang on one song, and sang harmonies and what could become a duet for another.
That night my hotel, due to a shortage of available rooms in the center, was way out in the industrial part of town, near where the Disciplines’ label HQ is. A big concrete building with “33” sculpted on the side. Well, I checked in and was told the restaurant was fully booked from 8pm so if I wanted dinner...I should go now. Hmm. I had already made my mind to stay at the hotel since going back to town was quite a journey and there wasn’t anything going on in Oslo that I felt like I needed to check out. It was 6.30, so I dropped my stuff in my room and headed up to the 9th floor to try and get my nutrition on. Upon arriving, to a mostly empty restaurant, I was told that they couldn’t get me in and out in time for their 8pm seating. I pointed to the panoramic view, currently showing a torrential downpour, and reminded them that the front desk had indicated that I dine there as long as I was done by 8..it wasn’t even 7 now. They claimed not to be open yet but upon enquiry the chef was happy to start, he was prepared for a full house and one more meal wouldn’t throw off his calculations. So, I was seated, and as I started to read the menu, I asked for some help as it was in Norwegian. At first they refused to translate the starters as they said there was no way I was having a starter and a main. By this time, I wasn’t angry, but I was playing the ‘exactly what kind of reviews do you want me to post on my blog, or tell my colleagues about this place?’ card. They eased up, and actually my server was really friendly and told me to relax and enjoy, he’d work out the timing. In the end I was done eating by 7.35, so plenty of time to set the table again! When you dine alone, it goes quick! I had some seared foie gras that had sliced coconut and salt infused with vanilla...and wonderful reindeer steaks that seemed to be marinated in lemongrass. I took my unfinished bottle of Cotes du Rhone back to my room, and drank myself to blissful, long sleep.
Except at 7.30 daylight in my window woke me up half way, just enough to stretch a bit and rollover, intending to drop back into deeper levels of sleep. But, upon stretching, I gave myself a leg cramp that was absolutely brutal. I couldn’t even scream! I was just making a kind of rr-r-r-r-r-rrr-rr-r-r-r-rrr-r-r-r sound and hoping it would stop. I got up to walk it off, and decided to go down and have breakfast. I thought it was starting at 7 or 7.30, but soon found out that it was starting at 8, and I, who had put some herring on a plate, was chased off and *yelled* at in Norwegian...I thought...’oh, but this is what blogs are for’, so here I am complaining for you all. I went to the front desk and complained...and was told ‘they are under stress, preparing breakfast for 400 people’. To which I said ‘it’s their JOB. If they find it to stressful to serve their customers and be pleasant, perhaps they should try something else for a living...’. In the states or UK if you treat a customer like that, you’re on your fanny that minute on the sidewalk.
Anyway, the point is, I got home to Paris, after months of travel, and saw my daughter, who was gone when I was home last month, for the first time...extreme shock at her two months of growth followed.
My flight home was fun as we had a good view of the countryside around Paris on our approach to Orly, I love spotting all the chateaux around, huge homes stuck in the woods, with gardens and tennis courts.
On Monday I had French songwriter
Kristov over, to give him some feedback on his new songs, we spend a couple of hours not only dissecting his recent compositions, but also talking philosophy and singing technique and all kinds of things. And then I fell asleep at 7.30 in the evening, and slept for 12 hours.
Love
KS
Paris
