Girly-Blog

It's my favorite B-grade holiday! We thought we'd be in the studio all day today, but after a rough start with the vocals a couple weeks ago, we went in and sang the whole record in one day. So we unexpectedly now have the week off before leaving for the west coast on friday. Hooray! This means i get to carve a pumpkin, go to yoga, and do laundry.

Meanwhile, we had a great little east coast jaunt these past two weeks--I was struck by the always happy realization that we're still capable of surprising ourselves. Everything that Nate & Doris said cracked me up (after reading a book called "Useless Information" we couldn't stop making up our own unbelievable little-known "facts" ) and it's been a lot of fun playing the new songs. It can be so thrillling to watch them evolve live, and to see how working with them in the studio affects how we perform them (and vice versa)...I'm such a geek around all this stuff. I really really love it.

Lastly, my dog Kali, who is 25 lbs., shiny, black, and sausage-shaped, will be going as an eggplant for Halloween. We just have to fashion a stem for her little head.

Alas, we have very little to report from the studio this week, as our voices started to wear out after three measly songs. If it were just a show, we probably would have plowed through, but since this recording might exist for the length of our current civilization, we thought it best to wait it out and heal.

Our producer Bob is going to Disneyland with his grandson next week, so we'll have to wait and record on scattered days in between our Northeast/Mid-Atlantic shows this month. It's frustrating to have to slow down after being on such a roll, but I suppose these upcoming shows will give us a chance to work out any remaining vocal kinks that might have been in the songs. I'm still hoping we'll have the CD available in the spring, but I've learned not to attempt soothsaying in these regards.

Anyway, this is my first blog entry! Worship me. But worship Doris even more, since she blogged about the "Diapers & Booberry" thing. Wow.

It's my day off today, but i couldn't resist blogging about this. We finished basic tracks for all the songs! We had a little extra time before Joe flew back to Chicago, so the two of us added some hand percussion using my djembe, his dumbek, bodhran (which is an Irish frame drum), shakers, etc. Once it's all mixed it'll just add to the texture of the songs, but it was funny yesterday playing all that stuff, because it sounded like a drum circle. In fact, it was so hippie that at one point we couldn't resist breaking into a spontaneous rendition of "Age of Aquarius," and at the perfect moment Joe began playing a pan flute, which endeared him to us even more. It was just such exquisite comic timing. (Even funnier because the way the studio is set up, we're all at our little stations and can't really see each other, but we can hear each other.) Tomorrow we'll move on to vocals, which is, of course, the Funnest Part Of All. But we'll miss having Joe in there, kickass drummer and honorary Girlyman that he is.

Well, after a few more hours of rehearsal in one of those quaint NYC band practice spaces around the corner from Madison Square Garden at rush hour (note to self: never again!), we finally headed into the recording studio on Friday to start basic tracking for the third Girlyman CD. For the uninitiated, allow me to initiate you. (For those in-the-know, allow me to patronize you!)

Basic tracking means recording the rhythm section, live. In our case this means we all stand in different soundproofed sections of the same room and record our parts into separate mics. For the 8 tracks we got down on Friday (yes, 8 tracks!), Doris played guitar, Nate played bass (yes, Nate has learned to play the bass for the sake of a bigger sounding cd. gotta love nate.), Joe played drums, and I played hand percussion. We'd run through the song from start to finish a few times, until it felt really tight, then Bob (Harris, our engineer and co-producer) would yell "we got it" and we'd move on to the next tune. We'll continue this process next monday and tuesday, until we've got all the songs down, then start with vocals. After that, we'll listen to everything all put together and decide whether the tunes are asking for other instruments and textures, then add overdubs of that stuff. Or the process could just up and surprise us, in which case we'll figure it all out as we go along!

It feels a little surreal to be recording so quickly, but the addition of Joe Chellman on drums and Nate on bass (don't worry, he'll be playing baritone too) has really changed things. Basically we're establishing a groove right from the start, roughly based on the groove that Nate and I came up with on baritone and djembe when we first arranged the songs for live performance, but also incorporating Joe's knowledge and musicianship. Doing it all live is one way to try and get some of that live show energy into the CD. It's a lot of fun, and a little scary, and a little different from what we've done in the past.

It's so interesting at this point in the process, too, because there's just NO way to know what the album will sound like, what the overall theme is, what broader picture the songs create, or anything. To me, the songs feel different than the last two albums in lots of ways. There was a lot more collaboration in writing them, for one. Some are very much pop songs; others are these crazy chordal trysts. We had so many songs we couldn't fit on the album, too, which is hard. There were lots of songs that we all loved at one point or another, and in the end we just had to choose. I hate that, though I'm sure we'll end up doing some of the ones we don't get to record out there at our live shows.

That's it for now. I'll try to post updates now and then on how it's all coming along...