July 06, 2005

9:48 p.m.

Keeper

I'm beat. Ten minutes to ten and I'm ready for bed. I wish I could say it's a trend, but we have gigs this weekend so there goes the bedtime.

I had two good days at the band's house, though. Yesterday we rehearsed and revised a few things, and made our plan for this morning, when we had a redeye slot on a local radio station to plug this Sunday's gig. We had to be there at 7:30am. Since I do not wake up quickly, and because I had to be able to sing, I got up at 6:00. Carol had come down with a bronchial cold, though, and this morning it was worse, so she didn't come with us. Chris and I went in the pouring rain, with our two guitars and our one song that we can effectively play without Carol, and we brought a CD with the audio portion of two songs from our DVD which could be played in between talking. It went okay in spite of the last minute changes. We made up lots of fake reasons why Carol wasn't there (not saying she was sick), and talked up the concert appropriately.

Carol was back in bed when we got home, having listened to us on their radio, and I promptly took an hour's nap as well. Out like a light. Then I got up, we did a little biz and then Chris and I went down into the studio to try to get a take of one of the newer songs, for the CD we're recording.

It's an intricate, fingerstyle piece with a lovely guitar arrangement. I did about eight takes with just guitar, trying to get a really clean one, and then tried to sing to one of them. Usually this works fine, but this particular song is a ballad that needs to breathe, and I'm pretty much following my voice with the guitar. So I was consistently playing it too fast. Finally I said, let's just do the guitar and voice together -- what I'd been trying to avoid because I like to finesse each thing individually -- and within two or three takes, we got what we thought was a good one. By then we were really hungry, so we broke for lunch.

Afterwards we went back down, the three of us, to listen to what we had.

It was a keeper.

Blimey, I had tears in me eyes.

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And now I have sand in me eyes, and a slight headache, and I think that's it for today.