Monthly Archives: June 2009
Re-evaluating My Board
I did a massive gear review today. Thinking along the lines that I’m going to ditch some stuff from my pedal board. These sort of decisions are just way too hard to make.
Maiden Voyage
Myself, Greg and John landed back on home turf on Friday. We’d apparently been in America for a month but it didn’t feel like it. I guess we had a grand old time and worked incredibly hard as well which is a sure fire combo to make the days pass quickly. For me personally, working on the record with the guys and Kevin was probably the coolest, most rewarding thing I’ve done to date. So it was kind of sad to leave but it’s always good getting home. There are things you miss when you’re away. For example being able to buy bread without sugar in it. For that matter being able to buy any sort of food without sugar in it.
We arrived at 530am so the mission for Friday was staying awake. The flight back to Brisbane was pretty great though. The plane wasn’t full and so as soon as we suspected no more people were boarding we quickly staked a claim to an entire row each, which made sleeping a whole lot easier. But jetlag always plays a role no matter what you do which made Saturday a little interesting. We’d booked a show for Saturday forgetting that we may require recovery time and realised as well that we needed to rehearse before we played it. It might seem strange but depspite the fact that we spent an entire month together as a band, a lot of that time being in the studio, we never actually played together so we needed to strip off the rust from our live performance.
Then came the show Saturday night, our first show which I will affectionately call the “Maiden Voyage”. And it was a great one too. Really cool venue, great crowd and good sound. Thanks to everyone who made it along and made our first show one for the memory bank. One thing I will comment on is how ridiculously cold Brisbane is at the moment. Well, for Brisbane standards anyway. I started playing the first riff of our set and found my fingers impossibly unresponsive and complaining from the cold. What’s going on?
New York New York
I’m back at an airport, San Francisco this time. I really like flying, I think it’s one of the coolest things you can do that’s usually massively taken for granted. But I’m not a massive fan of the wait around for a connecting flight, particularly when it’s because you chose a stupid route to save money. Actually right now I’m beginning to seriously doubt whether the money I saved was really worth the super annoying f*#k around I’ve experienced over the past five days. But enough about that.
Last time I checked in I was headed for New York City. I’d been to New York once before but I would have been as tall as my waist last time so it doesn’t really count. Andrew had hooked up so that I could stay with a friend of his in Brooklyn, which was awesome because I had seriously started to run out of money (or further run out of money). Unfortunately my already late arriving flight got delayed and so I got into JFK at about 1230am on Sunday. This is where it got interesting. I turned my phone back on to get a voicemail from Andrew’s mate saying he wasn’t going to be able to meet me at his place and to give him a call to sort everything out. No worries. So I called, no answer. Called again, no answer. I realised right then that if I couldn’t contact this guy I was in a situation where I was in one of the biggest cities in the world for the first time, without anywhere to stay and no real way to find anywhere at 1230 in the morning. So I thought I’d call John because he might be near a computer and he could find me a hostel. Turns out John and Greg were out having beers and a generally good time. Really helpful. I fretted a little bit (not too much) and finally got in touch with Andrew’s friend and sorted out to pick up the keys from the lady above him. This is where I’m just bad at life in general. You see I’d known the address of this place before leaving LA and yet for whatever reason didn’t think to work out how to get there. It only occurred to me I had no idea where I was going when I was on the train heading towards the city. I tried to call my host again but no answer. I do this sort of thing pretty much everyday. Welcome to my world. I’m starting to ramble so I’ll ramp up the pace. I called my brother back in Australia, and after laughing at me he google mapped the address and gave me a rough idea of how to get there. I got off at the right subway station, got lost, hailed a cab who drove me literally around the corner (a $3.40 cab fare when the starting fare is $2.50) which was kind of embarrassing, called the poor lady upstairs at 230am and finally got to bed. And that was that. I never actually met Andrew’s mate despite staying there for 4 nights and if he reads this I promise I didn’t steal anything or something like that. And thanks as well.
I guess the reason for me going to New York was to fly the Montpelier flag and generally try and convince people in the big city that our band was awesome. I’m not really sure how well I went on that mission but I met a few really cool people so that was cool. Here are some highlights from my time in the Big Apple.
- Walking through Times Square and randomly running into someone from back home who I didn’t even know was overseas. But, it just happened to be the same girl who I’d randomly walked into in the middle of Prague four years ago when I didn’t know she was overseas then either!! I don’t know what the chances are of that happening but I’d hazard a guess at not high.
- Walking over the Brooklyn Bridge and down along the Promenade. I saw a video clip based on the Promenade and seeing it in real life was really quite great.
- Grand Central Station. I’m a sucker for train stations. There’s something about them that I find really quite wonderful. And this one was awesome!
- Getting lost in Central Park. To me, having a park as big as Central Park right in the middle of Manhattan is quite simply an astronomical feat. They really got something right there.
- The Morrison Hotel Photo Gallery on Bowery. This was a great little gallery of music photographs. It had some spectacular ones. In particular there was a photo of The Police’s first ever gig in the USA which was at a little club in New York.
- Wandering around the West Village. There are some really nice buildings and streets in the West Village. I’m not quite sure how to describe them but it would be really nice to live on one of the streets.
- Bagels. I think I pretty much only ate bagels and New York pizza while I was in NYC (not quite but you know what I mean). There was this little bagel shop just down the road from where I was staying which I frequented. It was a massive shame they weren’t open at 430am when I was heading to the airport. I really could have gone a bagel then.
All in all New York was fantastic and hopefully we’ll manage to get back there very soon.
In The Studio – Part 5
I’m writing this sitting at Salt Lake City Airport, gate C6 to be precise, waiting for my connecting flight to New York City. In my attempt to save money on my plane fare I took a ridiculously inconvenient choice of flight. Flights out of LAX were substantially more expensive than from other airports and so I thought, why not just go from a random airport, it can’t be that bad. So my first flight was out of Santa Ana John Wayne which happens to be in Orange County. I didn’t realise it was in Orange County and I didn’t bother to check. Which in hindsight was silly really.
LA has awful public transport. And this is coming from someone from Brisbane, Australia, a city that has pretty awful public transport itself. This was my trek out to the airport (skip over if you get bored): I caught a bus from Ventura Blvd to Universal City; a train from Universal City to Union Station; another train from Union Station to Irvine; the 86 bus from Irvine station to the corner of Macarthur and Main; and then I was supposed to catch the 76 from there to the airport but I seemed to have a bit of a brain meltdown (I had a few drinks last night and didn’t get much sleep) and for the life of me I couldn’t find the bus stop. There was no one on the street save for some guy holding a sign and he didn’t seem to know. I wandered around aimlessly for a while and finally got my bearings only to see the bus pulling away from the stop with me stuck on the wrong side of the road. I was a little devastated because I had come so close to precisely executing my save money trek. I had to call a cab which ended up being only a $6 fare and in the time I had to wait for it I literally could have walked to the airport. But I made it albeit a little bit stressed out and then had almost all of my toiletries confiscated by security at the airport, even my toothpaste. Go figure!! They seem to be a lot more security crazy over here in America compared to Oz. I had to take my shoes and my jumper off and the guy at the screen was this loud, obnoxious, overweight, condescending guy who was just a wanker really. But I’m venting and I apologise.
Earlier this week we were losing our minds a little bit waiting to get back into the studio. Kevin had been mixing away on the completed tracks and we were left at home playing iPhone games (Peggle, by the way is a great example – I think John successfully completed the game 3 times) and getting restless waiting to hear them. If you notice a video currently on our Myspace page involving Greg wearing sunglasses indoors and Andrew playing a Ukulele understand that we filmed it in this losing our minds waiting around time. It might seem stupid waiting at home instead of actually doing something cool but we didn’t have a car and, like I mentioned before, if you want to catch public transport you’d better plan for it and have heaps of time. But we finally got back into the studio and it was awesome.
We’d decided that for the fourth track on the record we wanted to bring in a string quartet and so on Wednesday night we rocked into Fairfax to find a string quartet all set up and ready to go. You’ll notice a video below this of said quartet in action. It’s awesome enough on video but being there and listening to it in person was amazing. It was Kevin’s idea actually and it was certainly a good one. I can’t wait to hear the track when it’s finished. There’s something inspiring about being around really really good musicians and all four of those string players could play!!
That left one more thing to go: tracking the final synth parts for one of the songs. Andrew had been freaking out a bit because he was leaving on Friday and still hadn’t finished tracking, and sure enough Friday was the day he had to go in and finish. I headed along to the studio with him (I just love being in there and it was going to be my last time) while the other two swanned around Hollywood I think. He tracked, Kevin produced and I watched South Park. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the “Fish Sticks” episode of South Park but if you haven’t, definitely watch it. And then we were done. It became apparent at that point as you might imagine that our involvement in the making of the record was done and dusted. It was quite a sad moment really. When you’ve enjoyed making music in such a great environment for a few weeks, to know that that experience was over was kind of like finishing high school. Well, not really but I can’t think of a better example right now. We said our goodbyes to Kevin, Andrew cried (haha not really) and then Andrew took a cab to LAX to fly home and I took a cab back to the house.
Myself and Greg (being way cooler than John who decided to be a loser and not come with us) went out that night with some American friends to celebrate stuff, we got home really late, I woke up 3 hours later, experienced the shit fight of a public transport mission I described earlier, and that brings me back to the start of this post. I’m going to New York City yeah!!!!!!! And yes, you can safely assume that the next post will be about that.
Montpelier Strings Session
This happened last night. And all I can say is I nearly cried witnessing it. The incredible musicians in this video are The Section Quartet, a group based in LA who have played on a lot of really really good records (www.thesectionquartet.com). We were pretty stoked to have them play on ours. Eric Gorfain, the first violin player, did the string arrangement. So talented. Seriously though I nearly cried. Strings can do that to a man when they’re played this well.
Montpelier Strings Session from Montpelier on Vimeo.
