According to Mark Twain the secret of writing is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. That was the first thing I heard this morning. The joy of radio 4.
KT came in first thing to sing her last word. She had been doing the children in need show last night in Glasgow and had just flown down but was full of joie de vivre. She did her one word in one take. And then let us hear a work in progress that she was in the midst of writing. Sounded lovely.
Steve had a lot of technical bits and bobs to do today. He was putting down rough mixes of the two songs we’ve finished, and then had to bounce things to tape and clean up tracks. This meant that we were pretty much redundant for most of the afternoon.
I applied the seat of the pants to the chair. But seem to be only able to come up with verses, or other people’s choruses at the moment.
Once Steve had done all the necessary housekeeping we started on a new song. It’s a brand new one of Francis’ and is really rather lovely. Quite a fragile sounding paean to New York that he wrote while he was there last month. We kept the arrangement really sparse and delicate as it seemed to suit the song and it turned into a nice evening’s recording. Quite informal and relaxed with us all sitting in a circle. Fran on acoustic and vox, me on bass, Andy on piano and Neil playing frog shaped wood blocks. We had a few run throughs to get used to the changes. Recorded a couple of takes then we got hungry...
After dinner we went back in and did a couple more before going in to the control room for a listen and found that the first one after dinner was the one. Strange things become important in the studio, one being the timing of dinner.
Neil went in and added some great drums and after that it really didn’t need much more. In fact most of the things we tried seemed to detract from it rather than enhance it so we decided to keep it simple. A nice low key kind of day.
Get Travis Blogs via RSS (RSS?)
