about last night...

ok, so first of all i'd like to say something about this morning. i listened to two songs... ring them bells and most of the time of the Oh Mercy album by dylan.

good music raises questions... his raises plenty in the writing. like... i know he rhymes for rhyming sake, but how does he get away with so many throw away lines? wait, was that a throw away line? its like it all builds to one crucial line... and so are the throw away lines just rhyming for rhyming sake or building blocks that no one else gets away with? he paints with his lyrics, better than anyone else.

but back to last night.

my good friend JTR called me last night asking me to do a recording project for him at about 8:30 last night. he lives way out in green point and was asking if he could send me tracks to lay a few guitar lines on. i love this sort of thing. in the studio i've always operated better under time constraints and am a firm believer that the fewer takes the better.

so he sends me the track and i set up my sound recorder that i shorted out when doing the demos for the record i cut in rochester and, logically, it still doesn't show any signs of life except a gentle flashing of the display screen which tells me to give up hope.

so anyways, i end up using some freeware and reversing some cables, running to the club to grab a mic, warming up the trace (my little, but monstrous amp), tuning up the les paul and an hour later finally getting to the job at hand. one pass to get the sounds, one pass to track. then an hour to go back and forth with JTR to try and get it sitting just right because of an inexplicable delay that occurred in the recording process so the phrasing was off by a split second... and that was annoying... so then JTR writes me back and asks me to throw down another lead line in just to fill out a few bits... so i crank it up, get that really dirty les paul grind and another quick pass... and again with the delay! so i sent it over and told him to figure it out because now it was about 11pm and i really would like to keep from getting noise complaints if at all possible.

the weirdest thing in the whole thing was that from the moment JTR called i had the song "love is only a feeling" by the darkness running through my head... and the song he sent me really sounds nothing like that... or anything by the darkness for that matter... but it led to some obscure phrasing, so i guess i'll take the inspiration from wherever it comes.

despite the 2.5 hours for the project, i was only tracking for about 10 minutes, but for all the critics out there, i can assure you that these were not throw away lines.