Early part of the day spent adding bits and pieces to the loopy song. Was sounding good but we decided to leave it to rest for a bit. As you would do with a roast chicken. Nigel Slater advises taking it out of the oven and leaving for half an hour. And he is a culinary genius. (Have just started reading his kitchen diaries and they are a delight).
So with that one resting, we moved on to another new one. This is one of mine that we started last time we were in. It’s a tricky one. We reckon it’s a good song but can’t quite get our heads around how to get it to take off.
Sometimes getting songs to be as good as you think they can be is like trying to blow up a hot air balloon with your mouth. I have to confess we were a bit stuck. There are loads of ways of dealing with studio block. You can go for a walk. You can listen to hopefully inspiring music. You can get a pack of Eno’s oblique strategy cards, you can even watch some movies (during the last session in here we had movies projected onto the big wall in the control room continuously), but basically it boils down to either you stop or you keep moving forward. Nigel’s advice when we were making The Invisible Band was always to keep on making the work.
We opted for the latter and added lots of things to the track. Most of these didn’t work but a couple of things took it in an interesting direction. Andy saved the day at the last minute with a really great guitar part that led on to some good production ideas. We will continue tomorrow and see where we get to.
Have been reading your questions with interest so here are the ones I can remember.
1. Recommended CD, hmmm, at the moment I’ d have to say Gimme Fiction by Spoon or Scott 4 by Scott Walker. You really can’t go wrong with them.
2. Don’t think we’d do “I’m a celebrity”. Perhaps “I’m a nonentity”.
3. Can’t tell you any song titles yet I’m afraid. There are about thirty or so album titles on the loo wall and none have been discounted yet.
4. The track with Ben Stiller’s magnificent cow bell on it is still an album contender.
5. Although I can’t drive, my favourite car is the Citroen DS from the 70s.
6. We are very keen to come to Latin America when the next record is released.
7. We have been really lucky with the people we’ve worked with. But in the future it ‘d be great to make a video with Spike Jonze.
8. I’d love to do a song with Bowie of course.
Neily says he’d like to work with Bowie too perhaps we could be the spiders from Glasgow. He also says he’d love to play drums with Jim Keltner. Andy would have loved to play guitar with John Fahey.
9. Bass pedalwise I can highly recommend a distortion pedal called a big muff they are made in Russia and sound incredible.
Hope that’s ok for now. Sorry the diary was short today but I thought I’d spare you the tedium of tunings etc.
byeeee
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