beautiful, funny, sad & true

This month has been one of the busiest I’ve ever had.  Recording and/or rehearsals wish IrishBand almost every night, and one night Andrea came to visit and rehearse a song she wrote for her wedding, which is happening on Friday.  I’ll be playing cello and her sister will be playing piano.  From there we went to dinner at Por Que No (one of the best and most authentic (and least expensive!) Mexican restaurants in town) and then went to have coffee and play Scrabble at Palio, one of my favorite little coffee shops.

She won, by the way, but it was really close.  330-something to 314.  There will be a rematch, but I’m not sure when, since we won’t have a chance to hang out again before her wedding, and then of course she’ll be going to Canada for another ceremony with her family and then back to Switzerland, where she lives.

A couple more nights of rehearsals followed, and then I headed up to Seattle on Friday to play bass with my friend Brandon’s classic rock band.  Super fun to play and hang out with him again.  In the morning we went to breakfast and then I raced the three hours’ drive home to Portland, in order that I’d be back to set up for the IrishBand show at 4:30.

The show was a complete blast.  It featured a pair of dancers, an aerialist, a ukelele player, a sword swallower/fire breather, a martial arts/juggling/comedy group (Nanda; check ’em out.  They’re the coolest group ever, I promise you.), then IrishBand finished up with a set.  Oh, and then there was dancing for an hour or so after that.  It was a great time.  I’m not even going to attempt to describe everything, cause it would take too long, but my modus operandi is that if people do cool things in front of me while I’m holding a camera, it’s my duty to capture those moments.  Behind the scenes is where the real show always happens, anyway.

After partying for a few hours everything was set up and ready, we went out front and mingled a bit.

This picture is fuzzy (or was it just me?  har har) and terrible as far as quality goes, but at least you can get a sense of what the people and the main room were like that night. . .

. . .and then I handed my camera off to Whit, who took some pictures of the actual event while I climbed upstairs and sat in the balcony with the rest of IrishBand to stay out of sight of the audience and watch the show.

After Nanda were finished, we set up and rocked the house for about an hour.  Oh yeah. . .and then I danced.  Yes, believe it or not, it’s true.  I did some moonwalking (both forwards and backwards. . .dang right!) and a whole bunch of ‘normal’ dancing too.   A good time was had by all.  Those of us who were left at the end of the night had the pleasure of helping clean up the place and empty all of the risers and seats and everything out of it by loading them into trucks, but even that somehow ended up being a good time.

In other news, I’m going to see Yann frickin’ Tiersen (you know, who wrote the frickin’ Amelie soundtrack!) on Wednesday night here in little old frickin’ Portland.  And he’s not even playing at a huge venue, either, but the frickin’ Wonder Ballroom, which has about a 400-person capacity, and where I MYSELF HAVE PLAYED.  I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this.  I play the accordion because of him.  It’s true.

Le sigh.

I could watch this all day.  This kid (even at the age of, what, eighteen months?) has the act down pat.  He even knows how to use a microphone properly and time his arm movements with what he thinks he’s saying.  Those are skills that have to be learned, and he’s quite the little orator.

I used to have a much bigger chip on my shoulder about religion than I do these days.  I still kinda have one, which is why I find this video so utterly disturbing hilarious, but I’m much more tolerant of other peoples’ beliefs than I was when I was, say, twenty.  Suffice it to say that it’s a colossally good thing (both for me and the entire world) that I didn’t have a blog back then, but then I don’t think anyone did at that time; not even Steve Jobs or Al Gore.  Okay, maybe Al Gore did.

I think that might have been a digression just there.

The results are in, and it is, indeed, a digression.

I need to go put my laundry in the dryer now.  Oh wait. . .another digression?  Let’s find out, in the style of Family Feud.  “Di-GRESSION?  Survey SAYS. . .”  [sign on board flips over, and bell rings] Ding ding ding ding ding ding!  “Digression!”

Okay, I’m done.

How do you like the new blog theme, by the way?  It’s very different, and distinctly less blue, than all the others I’ve used before.  I wanted something a bit more cheerful.  I’m still learning how to tweak it, and working out a few issues I’m having (for some reason, my blogroll is showing up duplicated!?), but I think it’s cool.   Hello, spring!

The Indigo Girls were interviewed on NPR this morning.  Naturally, they also took the opportunity to play a couple of songs, one of which was “Closer to Fine” and the other was this one. . .

. . .called “Sugar Tongue.”  Loveitloveitloveitloveit.

It was just the two women and their guitars, and it was absolutely stellar.  This version has the electric piano, too, which is okay and all, but I found this acoustic version much more compelling than the ‘rock’ version from the CD (with the drums and everything), but discussing why I feel that way is actually a huge story in itself, all about music production, and the way I think about instrumentation and creating parts and textures, and all that kind of stuff.

That would be much too long a discussion, especially for a simple little entry saying that I love this song and that I want to share it with you.

IrishBand has been doing an incredible amount of recording lately at my place.  Drummer works early in the morning and is done by noon, so he’s been coming over here around one o’clock, where I have my drums and microphones set up.  It works surprisingly well, and sounds surprisingly good too.

A couple of weeks ago, we got an offer that we couldn’t refuse.  One of our musician friends, El Jefe, is in an audio recording program at the local community college.  Apparently it’s a really good program, and they sometimes ask bands to volunteer a day of their time so that the students can practice with a real group in real situations.  In return, the band gets a free demo of some of their songs.  El Jefe (in the black shirt and glasses) immediately thought of us, so we went in bright and early on Saturday morning.

We all had a grand time, and got two really good recordings out of the deal.  I can’t wait to hear how the final mixes come out.  The class will be working on them over the rest of the length of the semester or term or whatever.

Oh yeah. . .I forgot (which is to say, I remembered) to add some pictures of us too.

Irish flags tend to be pretty scarce around most recording studios, so we took the liberty of bringing our own.  Notice that we even put one in the room with Violinist, which I think looks really cool.  No pictures of me in this bunch, unfortunately (fortunately?), because these are from my camera, and I was the one shooting.  So.  When I see the pictures that the other guys took, I might post some here, but I’ll definitely post links to our recordings once we have some to share.

I also want to extend a huge thank you to El Jefe and the recording crew at the school.  They did a really great job, individually and together, and were total professionals.  Best of all, everyone left with a big smile on his or her face at the end of the day, which is always the most telling sign of a successful recording session.

Friday, after spending the day playing and recording drum tracks for my own version of one of Breanna’s songs from her previous band, I walked to the store to get ingredients for dinner.  Walking back up my street, arms full of groceries, I found that the police had all of the streets blocked off, and there were people standing on the sidewalk watching, all the way up the street.  I asked someone what was going on, and she said that it was drug-related, and that they were trying to get into the house of a person who was both selling and using drugs.  I continued walking on MyStreet, and a cop stopped me and told me that I wouldn’t be able to get through on MyStreet for a while.  I asked which way he’d recommend I go to get home, and he said I could walk up NextStreet and be out of harm’s way.  I thanked him and took the opportunity to quickly survey MyStreet in the process.  There were officers with rifles, and a SWAT team with an armored vehicle of some sort parked a block from my building, on the other side of the street.  I walked home quickly and grabbed my camera.

The neighbor lady across the street saw me and called laughingly to her husband, “Hey, he’s taking photographs!”  Someone walked over and asked the plainclothes policeman what was up, and according to NeighborSusan, “Apparently it was actually shooting-related. They located, or at least thought they’d located, a suspect for a shooting that occurred elsewhere at some previous time.”  The cop was telling people to stay inside for about half an hour.  I did, and listened with my window open.  I heard no gun shots, and the multitude of cars drove away half an hour later, so I’m assuming that means the incident ended well enough.

I guess you could say the jury’s still out on what really happened, (I’m gonna go with the shooting scenario rather than the drug scenario; drug busts don’t usually involve that many big guns and vehicles, unless it was a huge operation) but that was certainly not something you see every day in this neighborhood.