Winter Solstice

It seems that a FB friend is posting from the cave at Newgrange, so this is my Solstice morning:

woa the light is beaming to me through my screen -- thanks Karl!

new single and lyric video - "Old Languages"

The second new single from my upcoming album was just released today!

Along with a lyric video:

I hope you enjoy :) For the rest of 2012, 100% of the proceeds from sales of this single will be donated to the United Way Hurricane Sandy Recovery Fund. You can name your own price when you purchase it on my website if you would like to make a larger donation to the fund.

Mother Nature no happy

As we all know by now, the predicted Frankenstorm indeed turned out to be a monster. Many friends, relatives, and neighbors in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have been affected.

We were fortunate not to have flooding or power outages in the part of Brooklyn where I'm currently living, but Sandy impacted all of us in many ways and the devastation wreaked has been astounding. Some of my relatives still haven't been able to move back to Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore, while other friends have lost their homes completely. Along with the life's work of many other artists based at the Westbeth building in Manhattan's West Village, the Martha Graham Dance company's historic costumes and sets were submerged in 8 feet of water for days and suffered irreparable damage. The company is now trying to preserve whatever they can, from precious costumes worn by Graham herself to sets created by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Here are some links at which you can help:

New York Cares - volunteer to help with Hurricane Sandy Relief

United Way Hurricane Sandy Recovery Fund

Martha Graham Dance Company - Hurricane Sandy Recovery Fund

Natural Resources Defense Council | NRDC

You may ask why I've included that last one. It links to an organization that fights hard to protect our planet, and their work gives me hope.

Maybe we can't say for sure that Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming. But we need to protect the environment REGARDLESS of what is or isn't causing climate change. There are so many reasons -- the disappearance of species, the disappearance of natural and "unspoiled" lands, the threats to our food supply by the commercial aims of companies like Monsanto... I can hardly believe that these things have reached the point that they have. When people say that the economy etc. should be more of a priority, I truly wish they could realize that the way we treat our planet is quite directly connected to the economy and to so many other aspects of our well-being.

I remember the gas lines in the 1970s and the consequent banning of station wagons and other gas guzzlers, and how astonished I was to see the later mass popularity of SUVs that seemed to represent an amnesia and/or denial about the environmental concerns brought to light in those earlier years. At the same time there has also been a great increase in awareness about organic, local, and sustainable food, clothing, building, and holistic philosophy; these things give me hope too.

Brooklyn Raga Massive and a massive storm(?)

I'm in Brooklyn for now, to rehearse and get ready to start playing live more. Hopefully this will also include playing in Philly (and elsewhere) and continuing to work with musicians in both cities; we'll see how it all turns out. This week Tim Daoust and I had a great rehearsal and hopefully it won't be long til we have some shows to tell you about.

Afterwards we headed over to Tea Lounge in Park Slope, because Tim knew about an Indian music jam session happening there run by Brooklyn Raga Massive. I am definitely going to have to keep track of that jam in future, because it attracts some world class Indian musicians. Quite the night of blissful listening, and it brought back memories of some of the music I was listening to when writing my first album. Most especially, the lady below... here's the first song from her gorgeous album Qareeb, which I've listened to many times over.

In other news, a FRANKENSTORMMMM!!! is supposedly headed for the east coast of the USA just in time for Halloween... so I guess I'd better leave this coffeeshop behind and go buy a jug of water or something. Stock up and stay safe, everyone!

boxes, Brooklyn

So it seems I've boxed up part of my life and brought it to Brooklyn for a while. Don't worry U-Haul, I will reuse this box and all of the other ones.

It's time to put more of a live thing together so I am going with the flow. We shall see. I just need to figure out how to live in 2 cities at once...

Osmosis Song video peek

The "real" Osmosis Song video is coming very soon! Here's a preview...

video stills by Darcy Lyons

the first single is here! and more album news

At long last I'm happy to announce that "Osmosis Song", the first single from my second album, releases today on lacyjames.com, Bandcamp and CDBaby (iTunes, Amazon, and more soon to follow).  Lots of rainy, misty weather on the forecast all week... which actually goes quite well with "Osmosis Song" :)

The new album's title will be Circles of Swallows and it's due out in January 2013. We won't leave you hanging until then, though! You can expect to get another single or two (and at least one video) before the full album releases.

Listen here (and download it for free when you enter your email):

 

first single coming next week!

So excited to announce that the first single from the new album will be out next Tuesday! and, I just now posted a sneak peek at the cover art on the Fan Exclusives page of the website.

There's been so much going on here, what with all of the last minute final mastering tweaks, cover art, video editing, making release plans... but now everything's just about ready to roll so stay tuned!

DIY video! rawrrr

Here are some on-set pics from music video #2 which we've been shooting over the past week or so. I'm working with my friend, dancer and choreographer Darcy Lyons, to shoot and edit this one ourselves. We are using some movement ideas even though this one is not such a "dancey" video.

I won't post many spoilers -- although if you do want to be slightly more spoiled I'll be putting a few more pics on the Fan Exclusives page of my website. 

Here I'm mainly just sharing the beautiful places we've been visiting, plus a few of the things we encountered there. 

Perhaps the most exciting (ominous?) moment was when we came upon this notice:

did he post this? or perhaps he's one of the oligarchs... left behind as a warning

sending Darcy some kind of communication?

it seems she has been converted

Our third day of shooting took place in Valley Forge National Park. Oddly, I've seemed to be following George Washington around for the past year. We did the first photos for the new album in Washington Crossing State Park, and our Philly Fringe Festival shows happened in Washington Square, Philadelphia. Only that last location was chosen for historical relevance but what's up with these mysterious coincidences...

new website is live

Our website just got a streamlined new look! Stop by and check it out here.  You'll find some favorites from the old site but there's a lot that is new. The pics on the current splash page and site header are by super-photog (and super nice guy) Mark Jaworski. You'll be seeing more of his work very soon ;)

If you're a member of our email list, you have access to the Members Only page of the site where you will find first looks and exclusive content. Just sign in with the email address where you receive our newsletters.

On the "Mereminne Dancers" page, I'm planning to feature a different video each month starting with a fun little dance that hasn't been seen in a while.

Animal Songs - "Gophoria"; photo by Kristin Lodoen

album is in mastering

Excited to report that we've just sent the new album to mastering! Now would be a good time to join my email list, just sayin' ;)

yo ho

We're just doing final mix tweaks before sending the album off to mastering, and we decided to add some last minute vocal harmonies to a song. I wanted a reallly low, pirate-y voice so we tried to create it electronically, but that didn't sound quite right. Then remembered -- I know somebody who has that kind of voice.

arrrr ye scallywags

Aye it's me ol' matey Cap'n Jim Gallagher! who produced my first album with me, and was kind enough to come in for a last minute cameo on this one. How did I not think of that right away, after his awesome gorilla luv bvox on my first album?

I'm really hoping to have the first single out next month! but it will just have to take as long as it takes. We have to bring this music to its best before releasing it into the wild. Meanwhile we're also working on video #2... more on that soon.

more fun with Turtles

We've been mixing for the past few weeks, along with some last bits of recording. There are a couple of mostly electronic tunes and we saved those for last, so we are finishing up vocals on them now.

look deeeeep into the Blue Bottle

This has been another epic project and I truly can't say enough about producer Jeff Hiatt, who has gone above and beyond with the time, energy, patience and creativity that he has given to this record. It has been a real joy to work with everyone at Turtle Studios. I hope the songs will bring some of that feeling to you as well!

I come in with a lot of musical ideas and parts already created in my demos, but once we begin work with the live musicians we replace some of those electronic parts -- although we also keep many of them (and write new electronic parts). We collaborate with each musician to develop further whatever was on the demo, and/or to create one or more completely new instrumental lines. This kind of process takes a lot of time and patience as each song gradually grows a world around itself. Then, during mixing we have to figure out what to keep or what else to add, along with all of the other kinds of sonic shaping and refining involved at the mixing stage. Sometimes after listening to something over and over you can lose perspective, so you have to come back to it with fresh ears at another time. Or just put it in a big cave and call it a day.

hey let's put it in a big cave

that's a wrap! in more ways than one ;)

We shot the first music video for my new album this past Saturday and Sunday with MunkyTown Productions. It was an exhausting, amazing and super fun weekend!

Of course things started long before that, with lots of planning and a Philly dance rehearsal earlier in the week, plus a whole lotta scrambling on my part to get the costumes ready in time. There was some experimental late-night dyeing involved, the results of which seem to have turned out much better than I had thought at first -- especially since the resulting colors ended up fitting amazingly well with our locations.

yum yum! 2 sunflower yellows + 1 terracotta

Once the weekend arrived, after a little more running around looking for elastic and safety pins it was off to Manhattan for a Friday night dance rehearsal that was followed by a visit from our wonderful henna artist Tanaz, who worked her magic as we continued with logistical planning. Our director and cinematographer, as well as our awesome (and awesomely patient) leading man Mughen, came to the rehearsal as well so that we could all meet each other and be ready for what was to come. Once we finally made it back to Queens, where I and another dancer were staying with longtime (and fabulous) Mereminne dancer Rebekah Kennedy, there was only time for about 3 hours' sleep before our alarms went off at 4am -- and the first day of shooting was upon us.

The goal was to meet at the director's place by 6am and then head to our first Prospect Park, Brooklyn location. Once we arrived at Mohammad's apartment I still had to adjust everyone's costumes and makeup, plus add a few more special touches which I won't reveal here so as not to spoil too much.

MunkyTown gets ready to roll

We then set forth into the park to shoot at several different very cool spots that Mo had scouted earlier, spending the most time at one special structure where the first dance scenes took place. On this first day we were shooting four dancers plus our leading man and all performed beautifully, despite the fact that their costumes did very little to protect them from the chill. Our locations were mostly under cover, but at least the sun was out so that they could warm up a bit in between takes!

cold but happy dancers

more cold happy dancers

It was a huge challenge to deter the large numbers of Saturday park-goers from wandering through our shots but we all pitched in, and hopefully there won't be too many random dogs, joggers, kids on bikes etc. in the background of this video... we shall see! We finally ended the first day of shooting around 7pm and headed home to eat, freshen up the costumes and drop into bed asap.

We were only in for about 3 hours of sleep that night as well, though, since we had to be up at 3:30am in order to reach our Manhattan location early the next morning. We met the rest of the dancers (5 on this day) at Big Nick's (open 23 hrs!) on the Upper West Side for a quick breakfast and makeup session, then headed to our big Central Park location. We filmed there from about 7am until 6:30pm and, as we were shooting at one of the very most popular spots in Central Park, you can probably imagine the many challenges we faced on a sunny spring Sunday in keeping our scenes clear of characters that weren't meant to be in the video! There was some kind of big race going on, along with several tour groups, a series of different street performers, and all of the other things that you might expect from the wonderful carnival of life that is NYC. We also had lots of people watching our shoot and taking pictures, so I guess that you might see some spoilers popping up online before this video comes out. The film crew from MunkyTown did a simply amazing job, and the dancers and our leading man gave wonderful performances take after take. I am very grateful that I was able to work with so many of my longtime Mereminne Dancers for this video, along with fabulous new addition Lindsay Poulis; they all did a fantastic job even with very limited rehearsal time. Most of the dancing was improvisation and I knew that I could count on these ladies to bring it... and bring it they did.

I've only been able to watch a few bits of the footage so far, but I can't wait to see the rest. We'll be editing it all sometime this month and I can't wait for you to see the end result once my album is released later this year... hopefully, this summer. But for now, I'll be washing costumes for a few days! And the title of this blog post? It will make a lot more sense soon enough!

video in the works

I'm really excited to be working with director Mohammad Maaty of Munkytown Productions on the first video for one of the new songs. We were introduced by my music partner Tim Daoust, who scored Mohammad's short film Sides of the Track:

Mohammad has found some great locations for our shoot and we have a very fun storyline planned. I just hope we can bring it all together! We expect to be shooting at the end of this month, so that means -- yes, I'll be keeping busy in between recording studio sessions. There will be dance in this video so I need to gather and rehearse the dancers, find/make costumes, props, choreography...  Meanwhile there is still some work to be done on the other songs, so I guess I'd better keep this short and get back to my (music) keyboard!

almost done recording!

Things have been way busy the past few weeks and I haven't even had time to post here... looks like we'll finish up recording in the next couple of sessions and start mixing in April, so the album should be out before too much longer! Getting the album artwork together now and working on choreography too, for at least one video. I'm excited to bring dance back into the mix -- though really, it's always in there somewhere.

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beautiful music people

We've mostly been recording vocals lately, but we still have a few musicians coming into the studio. There's something undeniably special about recording a whole band at once but it's also really cool in a different way to work with one musician at a time. Each person brings some new magic to the songs. Usually when they first start playing and warming up in the studio, I want to say let's just record them playing their own music! Because they're all so great. It just makes me want to make a whole album of drums, or a whole album of saxophone... someday :) Then when these beautiful people blend their playing into my songs, I'm made even more aware of how each person is contributing a part of their own being to the song. Sometimes music is just so amazing that it doesn't even seem real.

I wanted to share with you the work of some of the most recent guests we've had at our sessions. A couple of weeks ago, Seamus Egan of the awesome Celtic band Solas came by to play on a couple of songs. Here's a great video from Solas where they all seem to be having so much fun.

And last weekend, we had Tom Tallitsch in to record saxophone on a different track that I can't wait for you to hear. For now, here's a clip of Tom performing his own beautiful music.

voxvoxvox

So the latest from the studio is that we've started working on vocals now.  Each of the songs is pretty different from the next and needs something of a different vocal approach, and I am really enjoying the process of finding that.   Fortunately there's also somebody hanging out near the mike for moral support.

We still have a fair amount left to record with the musicians as well. I'm getting a lot of ideas for a video for the first song... hopefully we'll be shooting that pretty soon!

bonobos and PG

One of my favorite things in life... bonobos jamming with Peter Gabriel.  I first heard about this a few years ago in a lecture given by BioMusic researcher Dr. Patricia Gray at UNC-Greensboro.

The video below shows the bonobos Panbanisha and Kanzi playing the keyboard when Peter visited the Great Ape Trust research center.  The bonobos use graphic symbols called lexigrams to communicate with their researchers.  The beginning of the video shows lead researcher Sue Savage-Rumbaugh talking with the bonobos about what they are going to do.  After Kanzi plays (at the very end of the video) he wants to go out in the room with Peter and Tony Levin -- well, I would too!