Sandwiched by Gravity Plays Favorites (yum)
left to right inside sandwich: Jared, Emily White, some guy I’m kissing, Joe Costa.
Here’s a video of Jared, Ben’s bass player (who also played and sang on “Oasis” and sang on “Have to Drive”), being his wonderful self. This is a typical evening. There weren’t a lot of ways to have fun in the studio.
Making progress…
Ben took this one. I was modeling my disgusting white leather dress I found in a used clothing shop, getting ready to hop on a plane for the “Shores of California” shoot in LA.
Notice the huge zit on the bridge of my nose. Go watch the Shores video. THAT is the power of a good make-up artist.
After I finished the “shores” shoot, I headed to Santa Cruz to work on co-producing the “Evelyn Evelyn”, a wonderful concept record recorded by conjoined twin sisters – not pictured here because they HATE cameras. I was co-producing the record with my good friend Jason Webley. While I was there, our wonderful engineer Tim Smolens cut some extra vocal tracks for “Astronaut.” In the kitchen.
Here’s a video of Jason re-playing one of the twins’ ukulele parts:
The next step of my bizarre album adventure was to head to this wonderful little studio in Cotati, California called Prairie Sun. It was there that I re-cut the basics for “Have to Drive,” “Ampersand,” “The Point of It All,” and “Another Year.” The piano sound was just gorgeous and my voice was in way better shape for some reason than it had been in Nashville. The engineer was a wonderful guy named Justin Phelps from San Francisco.
Here we are.
I was simultaneously working on some experiments with the band Estradasphere and so we just packed as much music as we possibly could into a few days. I would wind up back at Prairie Sun (which was most famous, by the way, for being the magic place that Tom Waits recorded a ton of his records) a few months later to finish up some of the work.
Here’s a little series of videos I made for MY MOM.
Luckily my camera only fit 30 seconds of footage at a time, or this short history would probably be more like an Andy Warhol film.
Here are some photos I took just ambling around.
Words cannot describe how fucking beautiful this place was.
We slept here.
This was the walk to the studio.
The very adorable and very helpful Prairie Sun staff.
This was one of the other studios…called the “corn room”.
The whole complex had once been a chicken farm. The acoustic in here were BIZARRE.
I came here to warm up my voice and tinker around on the piano.
Justin found a frog.
Tracking….
And here’s a little clip of me & Justin working on “Have to Drive.”
