beautiful, funny, sad & true

Guess who got a DVD of Metalocalpyse the other night? Thank you, Maddy!

She’s the one who told me about the show, and that I needed to see it. I watched a couple of episodes online, thinking it would be kind of a guilty pleasure, but I got hooked on it and ended up watching every single episode before they got pulled off of WebSiteLikeTV. I’m not going to lie; I love the show. It’s a cartoon about a fictitious heavy metal band called Dethklok. It’s hilarious, and gruesome, and completely brilliant. And now I have the DVD, so I can watch it any time, and share it with friends too. I suppose that by now you’re probably familiar with the function of DVD’s, so maybe that last sentence was superfluous, but enh. . .I stand by my choice. Last night I found used copies of Once and Paris Je T’aime, so that was nice, too, but ohmygosh. Can’t get enough of the trials and tribulations of Dethklok.

Tonight is the play reading group, and tomorrow is a Breanna gig, but what I’m really looking forward to this week is working with Andrea on her CD up in the little town of Welches all weekend. We’re going to attempt to finish all of my instrumental parts. Keep your fingers crossed. Among other things, this will involve loading a ridiculous amount of amps and guitars and keyboards and other things into my little Honda. If it’s really comedic, I’ll be sure to get pictures of it. I wish I had a picture of the back seat of Lara’s car filled with a bunch of my instruments during the Dirty Martini recording sessions. We had to roll down the window, and drive around with the cello case sticking out. That was a classic moment.

Finally, I can share with you one of the new songs that I’ve played on recently.

It’s a beautiful song by Bryn Loosely called “Please”, and it’s from his soon-to-be-released album called “The Wrecker.” I played electric guitar, xylophone (which I just found out the other day is not a xylophone, but is in fact a large glockenspiel), and cello on this particular song.

Check it out!

This is a pretty intense weekend.

Last night was a Breanna/cello/violin gig, and it was incredibly fun. A couple of friends who either haven’t been to a show in ages, or who have never been to a show came out last night, including TossedIn. Nice night, all around. On the way out, I ran into one of my old friends from my previous apartment building, which was a great surprise.

Tonight is another Breanna gig–minus ViolinistKarlee–down in Salem, which means I’m going straight from work and driving in rush-hour traffic to try to make it down there by 7:00.

Tomorrow morning, I’m meeting my dad and stepmom for breakfast over here at Milo’s, one of my favorite spots. From there, I have a recording session with TheShinsEngineer at noon. From there, I have an gig playing accordion on what will very likely be the last Crystin Byrd gig for quite some time, because she’s very pregnant. From there, I’m meeting one of my oldest friends–should I say ‘longest friendships?’ It’s not as if she’s ninety years old!–who is down here from Seattle to visit her Stumptown friends. It promises to be quite a long and interesting day.

I don’t know what it is about leap year that I find so intriguing, but I do. Perhaps it’s the lunatic (as in ‘saturnine’, ‘martial’, and ‘lunatic’) connections that it has with the moon’s cycle; I don’t know. Maybe I don’t need a reason. Maybe I just find it intriguing. I’ll have to do a little bit of investigating. Is it unusual to have a lunar eclipse so near to the leap year?

Answers another day.

It’s 11:30 p.m., and it’s a very stormy night.

Nights like tonight are the nights that I really miss my old Taylor House apartment. You know, the one on the third floor of the hundred-year-old mansion. The one with the beautiful views of the city from three different directions. The one that I could watch fireworks downtown during the Rose Festival, the Starlight Parade, and on Independence Day. The one from which I watched almost every single sunset. The one that I called the Rock Star Factory. The one in which I learned how to play the accordion and the cello. The one in which I learned how to become a recording engineer and producer. The one in which I went from being a regular guy with a crappy job to a really talented guy doing what he was meant to do with his life. Basically, it was the place I lived when I learned how to do (and to be) all of the things that I’m doing (and becoming) now.

On stormy nights like tonight, the wind would beat the rain against all of the windows, and threaten to blow the roof off of the building, and I loved every minute of it. In fact, the more the wind howled, the more I enjoyed it. I would crack the window open, turn off all of the lights, turn off all of the music, light a candle or two, and just listen to the wind. I’d sit at the window and look out over the lights of downtown, or, on the warmer stormy nights, I’d stand outside on the fire escape, drinking a glass of wine, daring the wind to blow me down.

I wish I would’ve had a camera back then, because the sunsets alone were priceless. But then there are the countless memories of Katrina Petrovisky-Mouskewicz (the best cat ever), Amber and her fearless blind cat Kati and her mischievous rat Hannah, Craig, Kevin, Jeri, Meechai, Pelsang and the constantly rotating crowd of Tibetans, Erika, Daniel and the constantly rotating crowd of Brazilians, Henry, Morgan, Kristi, Amanda and Simon; the house parties until 4:00 a.m., Decemberists sing-alongs until the wee hours, mix CD’s which I still cherish and enjoy to this day, Jake and Skip flicking cigarettes from the fire escape to the street below, endless hours of recording my parts for Crystin Byrd’s “My Silence” CD, S.S. Flint and her pencil drawing, Jaime and Becky’s “Bus Song” and “12 Step”, rolling up the rug and recording the sound of Laurena the flamenco dancer weaving her magic spell, playing the cello badly while Andrea played the piano beautifully, climbing onto the roof for no reason at all, reading in the sun on the fire escape, seeing BoringFish again, walking with my guitars to the recording sessions at Jackpot, and a myriad of other things.

Here are some pictures of the apartment and me at the time. I have more, but they’re not on this computer. The best ones of all are the ones in my mind, anyway. The two gables on the right (top floor) are that apartment. Yes, I had a fireplace. And yes, I used it often.

I lived there for three and a half years, from when I was 30 and change to when I was 34. Moving out of there, while it wasn’t easy, was the right thing to do at the time. Sure was sad, though. It was by far my favorite place that I’ve ever lived, and I fully appreciated it the whole time I was there. I look back on it fondly as the place that I lived during the biggest changes of my entire life.

LoveItLoveItLoveItMissItLoveIt.

[edit: Incidentally, my gesture in the bottom picture has prompted a few questions. Since Crystin Byrd is the one who took that picture, I was doing an imitation of something our bass player and his girlfriend at the time used to do, which was to randomly make that face and gesture, and at the same time make the sound of a hissing cobra. It was very funny, and they would do it all the time. They might sneak up on each other in the kitchen, or it could be just as likely to happen when they were sitting and watching a movie. They could do it in a romantic and funny way too.

So there you have it. Not that it’s going to make any more sense, but at least you know the context, and that it’s not a “Hey, baby, lemme grab ya” expression or anything.]

Tonight was the second set of recording sessions for Sarah Castro’s new band. This is the same group that I recorded the drums and electric bass parts for a month ago. Tonight was the night for electric guitars, keyboards, and a little bit of experimental weirdness.

Or so I thought.

I got home from work and had just finished loading guitars, amps, effect pedals, bag of tricks, the xylophone, and a couple of little keyboards into the car, when I got a call from Sarah. “Hey, don’t bring any instruments. There’s been sort of a change of plans. We may have to start from scratch.”

“Uhhhhhhhh. . .okay. Is there something wrong with the drums that we already did?”

“No, it’s just that–well, I don’t really know to explain it. Sean can tell you. Just come on over, and he can tell you all about it. We might be redoing drums tonight, maybe.”

So I unloaded all my stuff from the car, and I started to feel really anxious, so I called her back. “Hey, I feel like I’ve just been thrown a huge curve ball here, and I’m feeling really confused. What’s going on? What’s the new plan? Do you really need me tonight or not?”

“Yeah, just come on over, and we’ll get you some food–Do you like ahi tuna? (YES.)–and we can tell you all about it once you’re here.” I grabbed my little bag of drum sticks, just to be safe, and headed out the door. I’ll go pretty much anywhere for ahi tuna.

By this time, I was feeling really confused, and hungry, and tired from loading a carful of instruments twice. I made a mistake with the directions on the way to the studio, and almost got hit by another car while I was turning around in a parking lot, but finally arrived at a very nice studio, located next door to the Wonder Ballroom. It was full of guitars, amps, effect pedals, electric pianos and organs, and a beautiful Allegra drum set (with surprisingly crappy cymbals! WTF?? Wish I’d brought mine…) all mic’ed up and ready to go.

Turns out that the engineer is actually a pretty well-known musician and engineer, who worked on the Shins’ newest CD, among many other things. He told me his thoughts about what we had to work with, and what we seemed to be trying to achieve, so Sarah decided to go with his suggestions. I did too, after they all got me up to speed, so we started to record some drum tracks.

We did two songs tonight. The first one has a very sparse and deceptively simple drum part, almost like a ‘looping’ pattern. After a few false starts and technical mishaps, it took about three or four tries to get a good, usable take. The second song calls for a very ‘tribal’ drum part, with big toms and dark cymbal crashes for the entire first half of the song. The second half is where I switch to regular drum sticks, and pretty much just rawk out as hard as possible. Total blast, and it took just three takes to nail it. The end of the third take had a particularly good feel to it. After the cymbals faded out, in my headphones I could hear Sarah and GuitaristJimmy in the control room, laughing and clapping at the same time. “Todd B—–, everybody!” They ran into the drum room, saying, “Oh, man, that was IT. That was the one!”

The thing about playing drums is that the more I do it, the more I want to do it. I keep thinking about creating opportunities so that I’ll be able to do it more often. I keep thinking about what I need to do to my drum kit to achieve the sound that matches what I hear in my head. I keep thinking about what kind of band matches my playing style, and would give me the opportunity to play at my best. It’s really exciting to think about that.

So now it’s looking like tomorrow is the day for keyboards and experimental weirdness. There will be guitars and amps there already, so I’m bringing the xylophone, the Omnichord, the Casio SK-1, the toy piano, the amp that’s the size of a pack of cigarettes, and the cello. I have no idea what we’ll end up using; maybe all of those things, maybe none of them.

I can’t wait for you to be able to hear some of this stuff.