Hi Sweet People!
Well it took a couple weeks to “recover” from that EPIC time we had at the Sapphire this month! How fabulous that some of you could tune in from our new “Fan Flare Face Book Page”. What a great tool that we are looking forward to using as we tour around. I liked how people could interact and send hearts or thumbs up and comment! Thank you to those joining us from far away places! AND…it was a SOLD OUT SHOW!!! How fabulous! So many that couldn’t get in, our VIP’ers got FRONT ROW seats! Yay! For any of you that missed the “live stream” of the Sapphire show, you can go to your “fan flare” page and click on “video” and you will find that show.
Also, all of you have a CD coming to you! “Joy in the Ride” EP! That was our surprise at the show. Yep, usually you market a CD release way in advance but you know…I really enjoyed surprising you all with that! Even our members didn’t see that coming and I love the element of surprise and NEW! New music! Yay!
How did we go about this? It wasn’t easy keeping a secret from many of you! I was SO EXCITED! Here’s the process. I had finished these songs in late Dec. and hadn’t even played them out very much in Jan. Mo and I recorded them in our shop on a little hand held recording device that I purchased a last year. It allows me to record in such a way I can keep all the signals isolated. What does that mean? That means instead of one microphone pointing at us and capturing a “stereo mix”, we were able to isolate my voice, Mo’s voice, my guitar, Mo’s bass. That way, when I dropped it into my recording platform I could blend the levels and I think I nailed the mix personally. It’s the CD I’m most happy with and perhaps that is because I was in control! Ha ha ha!!!
Really! All of my recording career I have been subjected to some man who really hasn’t ever been a fan of our music, sitting in the recording room blending us how he thinks we should sound! Maybe he would think my voice needed “this or that” whatever his little contraptions were to run my vocals through that would wind up, in my opinion, deaden some of the naturalness out of the record. It is ALWAYS a challenge to get the EMOTIONAL energy on to the record. There are so many things about the recording process alone that can just beat the snot out of your songs, so it really is an art and you really need a good sound engineer to make it work and sound right. I know to the average listener, this doesn’t really compute. But this is why you are a member; to find out stuff like this. Right?
Anyway, I have all of you to thank! YOU supply the need for me to get new material onto the membership page and it forces me to “do it”! Ha! If I didn’t have people on the other end of this web corner wanting new material, my recording device would probably sit all lonely on the shelf. Do I like recording? Well, it can be exciting! I love working on projects with other people and other musicians! That is a real gas!!! I love their interpretations and inflections on our songs when it lines up right.
When it doesn’t, it really sucks! Ha! Hurt feelings can happen. If we have to kick people off the record, ugh! That makes it tough. But you don’t know unless you “go”. Unless you lay down a track of violin and hear that it really sucks on your song, you won’t know that it doesn’t need this or that. Most of the time I get a sense of what I would like to add, but half the time I have someone in the control room doing just that…controlling!
So…how this delightful little “Joy in the Ride” CD came to be is…Mo and I sang it out in the shop. I downloaded it into ProTools and rolled my sleeves up to better understand that difficult complicated recording platform. And wah-la! There you have it! Simple; just us! No one else! It’s our first EVER album like this and though it’s very stripped down and raw, I think it’s lovely! I hope you all like it!
The movie of the Sapphire show is now up on your membership page now and with Bonnie’s permission I added her song “From the Bottome” to the download section this month. It’s an absolute GORGEOUS song that rolled through my mind weeks before the show. She sang it to us and I asked her to play it after the intermission of the show. It was a truly fabulous collaboration!
For those who weren’t there, Bonnie (is the blond in the video) plays electric guitar like a champ! Her and I became friends about 5 years ago through a mutual friend. She’s a kindred Spirit! And when she is around in this town and we get a chance to play together it is such a fun time! She is an open heart and her soul shines through her music. Pretty magnificent friend!
The one and only..."Bonnie Johnson"! aka "Bon-Bon"
I hope you all are “enjoying the ride”! Tune in next month! I hope to have an interview up! Our VIP member Mickey Mckinlay will be hosting some questions for us to answer!
Enjoy Spring and Happy Easter!
