Howdy Folks. well I forgot to take my blogging cam with me, but what a grand night. Last night saw some good blues in Sydney with the Burwood Blues & BBQ's festival featuring most of Sydney's top acts so you would have been forgiven for thinking we'd have a quiet night at the Bald Rock...but no.
People were out, still in football fever mode (Theo's over the moon about Hollands performance) and what i thought was going to be a quiet evening turned into a long, late and jumping one. Thanks to our visitors from Wagga and some familiar faces, we played until close to midnight from an 8pm start, including (I counted) a 20 minute boogie.
Now the 'boogie' (official name, 'over yonder') have been steadily lengthening - Paul wants to top 25 minutes for a single song. Insane? yes! Fun? Definitely.
Cheers to Happy, Lisa and her blonde twin, Darren, Flossy, Jude, Lee and the G Man and everyone from last night. The boys were still recovering from their cumnock adventure, but they were able to get back up and do it all again, including the new material, which is starting to settle in quite nicely.
Rosie was simply on fire last night and I think he hit everything he aimed at. Repo has started explaining to the audience how to do a sing along and everything fell into place. In a bizarre, inexplicable brain function, I've memorised all the new lyrics. I brought my trusty falling-apart lyrics folder with me, with everything written out in BIG easy to read font (what point size is handwriting? hmm) and found I didnt need it. I am not sure how my brain cleared out space to fit new lyrics in, probably at the expense of something I'd previously know, such as how to pull up my pants or something.
Performance and vibe wise, I'd rate last nights gig as Officially Approved (from now on, that's how you drive!) - it will be interesting to see if we remain as cohesive as we head into the next weekends worth of gigs, or whether that was just one of those good vibe nights. We'll see.
The G-Man has given me the raw wav files to have a listen to. The next step was splitting the long sequences into takes and listening to them to find the best ones.
The recordings from the first day (tuesday) weren't saved, so that only leaves recordings from Wed/Thurs and Friday. Shouldn't be too many? Right?
55 takes. 55 takes in three days. Yikes.
IMHO everything except Snowy's song and the acoustic version of Same Old Blues are OK. Snowy sounds like the vocals are pushing too hard (too high for my register), so not sure what to do about that. Same Old Blues will be better electric than acoustic, but it was worth a shot.
The stand out recordings for me so far are Rest My Bones and The Way She Smiles. You can hear the rain falling during Rest My Bones - it's eerie. So now we have to have to obligatory discussion about which takes are the takes.
Over the next few weeks we'll be adding any overdubs and harmonies, then who knows what we'll do with it. As a (truly) independent outfit, no one is hollering at us to finish the project and we've already released 1 album this year. How keen can ya get?
What a heck of a week. Read on for pics and Vids from the Carls Chair Project. There will be further blogs from the other guys but here's what I captured during the week (and some random stuff, you know, the usual)
Today we finished tracking for the last two songs - Sunshine in the Rain & Rest My Bones - on the porch of the house as the rain was falling down. The temperature was well cold but I think it was worth it. We caught some nice rain sounds and managed to get through in time before our hands froze and MJEB's lips got stuck to his harp.
Rest My Bones is an interesting beast as it's more laid back than we've ever been - but it's got a nice groove to it and it's a gas to play - it'll be interesting to see how it goes down at the gigs.
After a big ol lunch we headed back to the pub to start working out the set list for tonight as we had a whole bunch of new material to play through. After that Stuart had cooked us a grand chicken curry for dinner so we feasted before the gig.
After the gig and back in my room I was reading some more on Cumnock - it's a village! This thrills me - I don't know why but it does. We tracked all these songs - in a village with population of around 290! This thrills me too.
Day 6
Theo and Carl went off to Orange to pick up the car that had broken down on the way to Cumnock. The rest of us started off with a bit of a communal breakfast before packing up all the gear and saying our goodbyes to Cumnock and our hosts Jo, Stuart & family (guys you are truly wonderful human beings).
One of the cars in the Stormcellar train got as far as Bathurst before breaking down - yep same car that had been picked up earlier same morning!
Drama.
But yes we did all get home okay.
I'm still thinking about Stuart's chicken curry - fancying a bowl right now!