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!

fans-only video from the recording studio

We still have lots more to do but I love this part of the process, meeting so many amazing musicians who help us to create the world of each song.  I just posted a little fans-only peek... if you're not already on the email list, you can sign up here (or like us on Facebook) and get the link to an exclusive video from inside the recording studio.

seriously good vibes

Happy Holidays to all!

inspiration

I haven't been able to get up to NYC as often now that things are so busy in the studio, and Tim has also had a lot of other projects lately, but we've still managed to stop by a few times this fall at the wonderful open mic at Bar 82.  Host Wayne Kral is so the man for keeping this night running.  Below we are playing one of my favorite songs, Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" -- one of the few covers we've done.  I've always loved this song (from the album The Future).  It took LC ten years to write.  I was thinking to say more about why it inspires me but I'll just let it speak for itself.