Another glorious morning. Walked in listening to the most recent Spoon album "Gimme Fiction".
I know I’ve been banging on about that band for ages but, to me, they are just amazing. So inventive and adventurous but completely accessible at the same time. Went to see them at Koko in Camden (great venue incidentally) a couple of weeks ago and they did not disappoint.
Got into the studio and everyone but Andy was in. He had a driving lesson so was excused. With the Suze song pretty much done we started working on another song. This is one of mine that we did a lot of work on during the previous session in here. However on listening to it in the interim we realised it sounded a little fey. So we decided on a radical approach to it.
Keeping what we already had, we went in from the foundations up and got Neily to redo his drums. He is sooo good at this kind of thing. Even if tracks move around a lot, as far as tempo goes, somehow he manages to second guess all the tiny changes and stays totally on it. He’s like a Zen master. Almost immediately he came up with this incredible half time beat and we messed around with the sound of the kit until it started sounding really exciting.
Neil did a few takes and little changes were made here and there but he got it done pretty quickly considering how difficult that is to do. The character of the song had changed completely so I went in and did a different bassline that complemented the new drums but still went with the existing music. Was really good fun. It now sounds the exact opposite of fey. Everyone seems happy with the changes.
Around 8 o clock K.T. Tunstall came in to do backing vocals on Suze’s song. We met KT at one of the little club shows we did for the singles collection. I believe it was the Cavern show in Liverpool, but don’t quote me on that, my memory is as reliable as my computer. (Web Team note - this is correct. See link below for gig details in the archive)
She was playing solo with all the delay pedals and making up her own backing track as she went along. Was very impressive technologically but even more so for her voice. A fantastic singer with such a lot of soul. We feel very lucky that she agreed to come in and help us out. She is in there at the moment, so I’m going to go and see how it’s going. Back soon. All done! Very quick. She’s astonishingly well pitched.
After KT had gone Franny’s friend Demetri from New York came in for a visit. He is a stand up comic and is over doing shows. What a nice guy. Really funny ,which is fortunate. You should go and check out his website.
Seeing as it had been a good productive day Franny, Demetri,Neily and I went down to this great little underground club for a nightcap. Andy didn’t come along as he is on high baby alert at the moment. The club was a place that Franny had found a wee while ago. It’s a tiny place on Wardour street that tonight had a great band playing reggae. The singer couldn’t have been older than about 14 but was just incredible.
Found out that Demetri was a fan of my favourite artist, Tom Friedman (really beautiful, cerebral but poetic stuff, for example he has this piece called “a thousand hours of staring” which is just a piece of paper that he stared at for an hour a day for a thousand days, not for everyone but it’s the kind of thing that really appeals to me, google him if you fancy it), so we raved about him for a while, then the club got too busy to move so we called it a night. Good day. Goodnight
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