It’s been a few days since the last update so allow me to recap. On Saturday we did some stuff and took the night off. Vanessa played a gig with Felicity Groom and the Black Black Smoke which I attended while Brett did not much and Chris did something else. Sunday we had a rather lazy day. Our friend Jonathon came in and took a little video footage of us talking about the record and then we did some rehearsing for the Wild Oats gig. Yesterday Ness came in and put down the last of her bass tracks for “Underdogs” and the Nork Song which might end up being called “Mistakes”. After that I recorded vocals for “Battlesong” which we worked on in to the night.
So we arrive at today with not a whole heap left to do. Brett will come in and record some harmonies and percussion on the last two songs I finished vocals on, “On & On” and “Battlesong”. Dave and I worked hard on “On & On” through the night last Friday and got it sounding really good, turning it inside out and upside down and generally screwing with it until it got exciting. It was great fun.
Brett is now laying down some tasty percussion and triangle. Is there no end to his musical talents?
Only a few days left to go now...it will be a relief to finally finish tracking this record that we started two years ago. It’s been a long trek.
I am a sweaty man at my computer writing this blog and listening to Spoon having just recorded a vocal track currently called “On & On” but we’ve all agreed that this is a shitty title and it will get a new one, probably by next week.
It’s been just me and Dave in the studio today. Yesterday while I worked on finishing lyrics to the new songs we have Dave spent time mixing “Freakin’ Out” and “Oxygen” and both are sounding really cool. They are both up tempo feel good tunes. Today Dave did a mix of “High [Horse]” before I started singing. Once I’m done with all the vocals on this current song we’ll work in to the night doing all the really fun stuff, adding extra instruments over the guitars, bass and drums and pulling things out and just generally turning the song inside out. It’s great fun going through that process with a song. More often than not the song becomes something completely different and new and better overall. Every now and then a song is just right the way it is and doesn’t call for any kind of major surgery. “Oxygen” sounds nothing like it did originally. “High [Horse]” and the Norfolk Song sound pretty much like the four of us playing in a room together and no major overhauls were deemed necessary. Considering this is such a “studio” album for us, it’s quite nice to hear a couple of songs that just capture the simple vibe of the four of us playing in a room together.
Til next time!
Love
Kev
Feeling rather a little too well rested after our day off yesterday, it was back to work again today. Chris came in and we worked on a song called High [Horse}, which is one of our older tunes that we rescued from a past demo session when we realised perhaps it was worthy of our attention. It’s a punky little number. Chris added a couple of flourishes on guitar and also a little afro style percussive loop in one section of the song which I thought was a crazy idea but as it turns out it was crazy enough to work.
Right at the end of Monday night I sang vocals to a piano based song called “Underdogs” which was written during this session and could well find a home on this record. It’s certainly different to anything we’ve done before.
Ness has just arrived and will lay down her bass to a song that has the working title of “Nork Song”, due to the fact that we wrote it during a rehearsal at the Norfolk Hotel in Fremantle, a wonderful little pub that those reading this who live in Perth or Freo would likely know about.
After that Brett will turn up and we will start rehearsing for our show at Wild Oats next Saturday in Northam. A fair amount of dusting off will be required but the old songs usually come together pretty quickly and we will be able to trial a few new songs aswell, whether people want to hear them or not. During rehearsals Chris will have to duck out to play volleyball, a rather new recreational pursuit of his that he uses to clear his mind whilst also purging himself of his aggressive competitive streak!
That’s about all for me to report at the moment, apart from the fact that everything is going swimmingly.
Love
Kev
MONDAY 1st MARCH
Hi again,
More updates from the Jebosphere...
Yesterday and today Brett has come in for his first day of the session and we went through a bunch of tunes adding percussion and extra harmonies aswell as some organ on “Freakin’ Out”. There is a very special song Brett is working on and it is with great excitement that I can reveal he has written the lyrics for it and is also singing lead vocals. In fact, he is singing the vocals as I type this. Some time ago Brett bought a brass instrument called a cornet and he has also played that on the song. It’s a strange instrument that I guess is kind of like a bugle? He will freely admit he has no idea how to play it but I assured him that most of us have no idea what we are doing most of the time and that it didn’t matter. Besides, the song he is working on is so special it requires a certain x factor, if you will. This shall be the last I mention of this song. Those of you whose interest I’ve piqued I’m sure will do the necessary future spadework to find said song, wherever it ends up.
We’ve decided to take tomorrow off and will be back in again on Wednesday when Ness will lay down some bass on the two remaining songs she has left to play on. I was informed via text message just a second ago that Jimmy Eat World gave us a shout out during their set at the Soundwave festival, which is currently happening a few suburbs away. What a sweet thing for them to do! We had a great time touring with them across America some ten years ago. Also on that bill are the Get Up Kids, who we also toured with both here in Australia and in America. I think Chris has made plans to hang out with the tomorrow and I hope to join them. I haven’t seen them since the final show we played with them in Detroit in 2000.
I think I will soon be due to sing harmonies on the song Brett is currently singing on....oh yeah, I wasn’t going to mention it again was i? That’s definitely the last time then.
Til next time
Kev
SATURDAY 27th FEBURARY
As I write this Dave is going through a bunch of vocal takes I just did for a song, at this stage entitled “Freakin’ Out”. I’d recorded the vocals during the last session but on reflection thought they were a bit pus so decided to do them again. I think they might be good now. “Freakin’ Out” is sounding really great. It’s very dancey. It reminds me of when I used to go to raves as a teenager. Not that it sounds like Orbital or anything but it is very danceable. You guys can handle a dance song right?
Yesterday Chris and I spent almost the entire day working on a song called “Battle Song”, (working title) which went really well. While Chris tracked guitars I sat outside the control room working on the lyrics. It’s sounding rather heavy and epic and the chorus is huge and I get scream my tits off which is always fun for me especially lately as I just haven’t really done much screaming lately. What is it about loud guitars and screaming in to a microphone that is so exciting, even when you are (only just) over 30? It’s a very visceral experience and probably connected to some kind of primitive human instinct. I love the song “Mother” by John Lennon for its screaming. I think that song could be one of the most breathtaking displays of screaming ever recorded. I think he and Yoko had been doing a lot of scream therapy at the time. I wonder if it works?
Anyhoo...Chris is coming back in to night which is good because it’s just been me and Dave all day. Not that I don’t enjoy spending time alone in the studio with Dave, in fact quite the contrary, it’s an absolute joy, but the more the merrier right? Not sure what song Chris is going to work on when he arrives.
At the end of last nights session we started coming up with a tracklisting. The song titles look so good in a list. I think I must be getting pretty excited with the record if just looking at the song titles written in sequence is giving me a thrill. We also have a working title for the record but I don’t think I’ll share it with anyone yet just in case anyone has second thoughts. I hope not, cos I think it’s perfect.
Brett came in to the studio late last night with a new instrument he bought whilst recently holidaying in Hawaii. It’s a ukulele and it sounds awesome so we might have to find a place for it somewhere on the album. There is a strange compulsion, I thin, with musicians to always use new toys when they appear. A perfect example of this is a keyboard that Brett, again, recently purchased on ebay. You are probably getting the impression that Brett likes to buy toys. He does. So, he bought this keyboard that has a vocoder on it which none of us have ever used before. For those of you unfamiliar with vocoders, what you do is sing in to a microphone that is connected to a keyboard and play the keys and your voice gets synthesised to the tune you are playing on the keyboard, as opposed to the tune coming from your voice. I’m not sure when it originated, perhaps the 70’s? It has an air of that 70’s futuristic thing about it, when synths were being invented and stuff. As you can tell, I’m no expert on these things. Of course it has now been used a number of times on the album, but only where absolutely necessary and never in an indulgent way I can assure you!
I’ve taken some photos over the last couple of days and will endeavour to get them up as soon as I can be motivated to grapple with the necessary technology required to make that happen. I know it’s probably the kind of thing a 5 year old could do in their sleep these days but computers have never really liked me much and often the feeling is mutual.
Okay, I better go do some work – although it’s hardly hard work at the moment. There are precious few things that would make me happier right now.
Love,
Kev
FRIDAY 26th FEBURARY 2010.
It’s been hovering around 40 degrees the last few days in Perth making conditions for tracking almost unbearable. I’m not talking about the heat as such, more the amount of pasty man flesh that’s been on display as the boys try and cope with the heat. Ness is fine. As my dad once said, girls don’t sweat, they glisten.
This is the final session of tracking for our fifth album, a process we started so long ago the exact time escapes me but I think it could have been mid 2008. Braxton Hicks is already 6 years old, so it’s been a while between drinks for us but we are all feeling fantastic about the way the record is shaping up and have enjoyed the creative luxury of being able to spend two years on a record, as opposed to one month which is the time it took to record all our previous ones. As you can probably assume, this is a very “studio” record. I know what I mean by that but I I’ll let you come up with your own conclusions on how to take that description. Fear not tho, it sounds to me every bit as “Jebediah” as anything we’ve ever done, although it definitely has it’s moments that veer in to previously unexplored sonic territory for us.
When we started in 2008, we had about five songs that we thought were good enough to get started on an album. We decided to work with Dave Parkin at Blackbird because we had always enjoyed working with him on the many demo’s and b-sides we’d recorded together, plus we knew from the albums he had made with Red Jezebel that he would be sympathetic to what we were aiming to achieve, which in very simple terms was to throw out the rule book, experiment and have as much fun as possible. It’s possible that having such a long gap between records has helped us all to be able to take on that challenge wholeheartedly, without losing our nerves at the last hurdle.
We didn’t reconvene again until some time in 2009, when we added another 3 or 4 songs to the list of the original five we had begun. Then in November or December last year we did our third session, recording three more new songs, which means we arrive here at our final session with the makings of an album, albeit an unfinished one. We’ll be here til March 13th and at the moment it looks like we are on track to be finished in that time.
Today Chris is in the studio with his guitar to do some touch ups on a song that at this stage is called “Battlesong”. We have a few broken amps to contend with unfortunately. Anyway, it’s one of the newsest of all the songs, so at this point it’s just drum, bass and rythmn guitar, with some piano in the verses. I haven’t done vocals for it yet because I’m still working on the lyrics. I think I need to channel Springsteen via Eric Bachmann. Could be tough.
Last night I re did my vocals on a song called “Control”, which we’ve played live a couple of times on the rare occasion that we’ve played a gig over the last few years. It’s a pretty upbeat pop song that turns a little feral half way through. I’ve memories of jamming it up in the early hours of New Years day with Chris in my kitchen a couple of years ago. What we played then has pretty much remained through to the finished version.
Some other song titles are “Oxygen”, which is weird and summery and fun and weird, “Lost My Nerve”, which is a bit of a band favourite and could quite possibly open the record. It’s perhaps our heaviest song ever, along with “Reds Are Under Your Bed”. “Freakin’ Out” is dancey, “She’s Like A Comet” we’ve played live a few times along with “To Your Door”, which is all Tom Waitsy in the verses and also weird and fun. I think weird and fun seems to be the common thread here. Anyway, I’ll do my best to write this diary on a daily basis. I’ll also try and get the others to write something too but I’m not making any promises!
Love
Kev.
