Are You Dave?

Greetings from Baton Rouge, LA, where we’ve just spent an absolutely delightful Thanksgiving with relatives. As with all good trips, this one has been marked by meals. Since we arrived Monday evening I’ve enjoyed yellow grits, spicy shrimp, chicken and sausage gumbo, grilled alligator, cajun honey-glazed maple-leaf duck, corn maque choux and crawfish wontons (and this doesn’t come close to the meal list I racked up last time we were in Baton Rouge. No frog legs this trip, for example).

Thanksgiving dinner consisted of the following:

• Artichoke mousse, utterly delicious.
• Not one but two smoked turkeys. I was in heaven, and I didn’t have to wrestle anyone for a drumstick.
• 2 dressings (what we call “stuffing” where I grew up): One was a rice pilaf with cranberries, apples, pecans and so much more; the other was a corn bread dressing with bacon.
• Fresh venison courtesy of cousin Dylan, wrapped in bacon with cream cheese. Mind-blowing. I’ll be bringing this little delight home with me.
• Squash casserole, an alternative to most yellow zucchini recipes I grew up with.
• Sweet potatoes topped with butter and brown sugar crumble. MMmmmMmmmmmmmmmm.
• Pumpkin pie (not allowed to reveal the secret ingredient, but let’s just say that 25% of the milk was replaced with alcohol - alcohol bakes out, flavor doesn’t)
• Jam cake with cake gravy.  I’d never even heard of this, but rest assured it’s utterly delicious. It’s cake made with a LOT of lingonberry jam, so it’s amazingly moist, but not, you know, jammy. The gravy is brown sugar and butter heated and drizzled.
• Cranberries and Lingonberries.
• Tums. I’m not as young as I once was.

For those of you keeping score, that’s two recipes involving bacon. That’s my kind of Thanksgiving!

I’m thankful for the incredible family I am continually discovering all around me. Even as my own blood relations continue to become more interesting with each passing year, I continually rediscover that I married into quite a clan (in fact we’re meeting a brand-new “long lost” cousin on my wife’s side in Massachusetts in December).

Counting my blessings and popping another tums, I am off to bed. Tomorrow we fly back to NJ. Whee!

Dave

TIme’s up! We finished Maiken’s parts, whew. Now we have to break down and bring everything back to the rehearsal space! OY!

Lightin' a fire!

 

Wow, this is taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I think that’s because we’re going back and fixing things, rather than rolling forward and worrying about fixing mistakes later. That’s why we do multiple takes!

Anyway, Maiken is doing her keyboard part for the second song. Clearly she won’t get to all five tonight. She can record stuff at my house, but we’re out of town next week for Thanksgiving, so if we’re going to do that it’ll have to be over the weekend. Not sure what’s going to happen or how much of Maiken will end up on these recordings. Sleepy, so sleepy….

Dan the man

Justin, Studio Warrior

Eight takes later, we’re done with rhythm tracks for song number 5. It’s time to break from that part of the process and let Maiken record her parts. With her keyboard set up in the mixing booth itself, we can put a vocalist in “the box” and maybe an acoustic instrument in the main recording room, and knock out a bunch of stuff in a tearing hurry (provided no one makes a mistake).

Laying down guitar tracks

Maiken concentrates

Hi again! We’re back in the studio, picking up where we left off last night. It’s 7:30 and we just finished the first track of the evening. Dana and I just ordered sushi and we’re moving on to song number two….

Dana brought the funk

Brandon brought his sticks... honest!

Done for the night. We have three songs down (drum and bass tracks, anyway). Tomorrow we’ll tackle three or even four more, and then the overdubs. Emphasis on Maiken’s parts because she’s moving to Sidney. Sniff. ‘Night!

A hard night's listening.

Really! It's hard work!

We’re gonna nail one more then cal it a night, I think. Basically we’ve been laying down the drum and bass tracks. Tomorrow we can maybe knock out one (or even two) more, then dub the vocals and acoustic instruments (guitars, sax, etc).

Dan is a sweetheart, he’s really focused on helping us get everything recorded. When it comes time to make real decisions about mixes and such I think we’ll really get a taste of his experience and expertise, but for now he’s just non-judgmentally recording every take (and we’ve done a lot of takes).

I’m having a ball in the studio. It’s hot, but there’s Coke and beer in the fridge. Everyone is getting into the swing of things. Dana is stuck in the “isolation booth,” the vocal recording booth, because she’s mainly playing shakers and other percussion instruments on these particular songs. She’s in there with the lights out and her funky light-up feather boa blinking away. Again, I’ll post some video when I have it.

Pizza break! We’re on song two, but flying along now that we’ve got all everything set up.

HI everyone! I’m posting tonight from Garden Street Music. Dan keeps a PC running here, so I’m posting a quick entry while we’re getting the drums ‘n’ bass set up in the recording room. It’s a long slow process, apparently–we got here at 6:00 and now it’s 7:30 and we’re still getting those two up and running. I think we’re almost there. I took some pictures and video already with Dana’s camera; I’ll post the results as soon as I can.

Dave

I love this song, I love this band.