Tired & Fat

Yeah, so I’m a little bombed. So what? You’d be celebrating too if you’d just finished mixing your brand-new record.

We finished ‘Hollywood Arms’ — guitars, vocals, and piano all — within an hour of my arrival at the studio. (Of course, Kevin had it well under way prior to then.) We added one last string part, then mixed in down in record time. It sounds terrific: haunting, melancholy, Xanaxed-out, and far better than I could have imagined when I wrote it wandering around Santa Monica last summer.

Then we moved on to my cover of ‘Leavin’ On A Jet Plane.’ Kevin noticed a faint buzz on the recording a few days ago, so we added some city sound. I sat on the bench in Madison Square Park, there below the Empire State Building, and recorded the sounds of car horns, bus brakes, wind, and people passing. We used it as a bed, as suture, to get into and out of the song. I’m excited that this record has ambient sounds: the street, counting, breathing and talking. It makes the record sound more lived in.

Then we tweaked the intro to ‘Radio,’ which, suffice it to say, takes me back to my early days when a few hits on a fatty and a pair of headphones made Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ an auditory adventure.

And then we were done. Kevin asked me how it felt, and I said “Tired and fat,” after which we swore off beer henceforth. Then we dragged Jeremy out for a few drinks. And before I knew it, our Uma Thurman look-alike bartended was moving us along. And so I hopped on the NR, final mixes in hand, and rode back home to Hell’s Kitchen.

I have yet to sequence it, ie: decide the track order. I have to Fed Ex it out for mastering by tomorrow night, so rest assured, it will be sequenced. Meanwhile, though, I’m barely holding on to the waking world. So look forward. The sun will rise tomorrow.