10.11.27: This Week in the Studio

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The King is Dead.  Long live the King.  Birdie’s in the Bag.  Ducky’s in flight.   Hannah lead.  David new.  Jimmy performance credit.  WHAT????

Hot off the heals of the Autumn 2010 Spanish Jam, we reconvened in London to start CD 4, which we are calling Ducky for now.   Why ducky?   There’s a great Peanuts cartoon from August 14, 1960 where everyone is looking at the clouds.  Linus and Lucy see amazing things in the clouds — when it comes down to poor Charlie Brown he confesses that he was going to say he saw a horsey and ducky but now’s a bit embarrassed .     As we move to finish the third CD, If I Were A Little Birdie,   Andy’s sends out mixes to the Band.  Ed comes back with ‘the kick is off at 1.47 and Rob is playing a dodgy Am at 2.43.   And we need a Dm going into the middle 8 to soften Lou’s vocals.’   Jimmy has an e mail that says – ‘drums cool, make louder’ — he quietly deletes.   So running joke in the band about whether Jimmy hears the ducky.   Thus the hold for the fourth album title – it definitely won’t be this!  Here’s the cartoon, which took FOREVER to find:

Jimmy only hears the Ducky...

Anyway, I digress. The point is that we never rest too much… the third album almost done (down to liner notes and one final mix) and we’re off to the fourth, building on songs we did in Spain.  This week we tackled Floating and Saved (Ed’s Version:

  • Floating:   A silly little boy-girl number, meant to be played live, along the Juno lines of Anyone Else But You…  Below you’ll can watch the Moldy Peaches do it life on the View.   We’ve invited a new Artist to the Studio, David, who leads a lot of male vocalist groups.   Welcome David.  And we tried out Hannah in her first lead vocal (ironically, she was performing at a school play three times this week as a lead vocal, but oh well).   Ed led the litle band in a live version, sitting on the studio floor with Ed playing lead guitar and  tambourine, Mike on Congas/Bongos together, Rob on Bass and Bird Whistle, David on lead male vocal and samba whistle, Hannah on Kazoo and vocals and…. wait for it…. wait for it… wait for it…. Jimmy on Slide Whistle.  Yes, he might actually get a performance credit.  We also had Mike, Ed, and Charlotte on Backing Vocals.  Ideas was to make sure we could perform it live, similar to King Henry’s Tears.
  • Some nice photos of Band taking a stab at Floating:

  • Saved (Ed’s Version): You’re going to get a lot of this Ed Version, Andy Version thing, because we want to try to take one song into two completely directions and finish both.  So we worked on Saved, trying Charlotte on lead vocals following up from Spain.    Worked well, although we think Charlotte got a little tired of doing a track singing SA, then a track singing A, then a track singing A-E, than a track singing D.   we were trying to get her to stretch SAVED for a good thirty seconds.   Didn’t work very well, and she suggested to her two producers – Rob and Jimmy at this point – that it might work better if she just held the word for thirty seconds.  Oh.  Worked quite well.  The two of us hadn’t thought of that.  Hmmm.

And that was pretty much it.  Long day, but fun to get stuck into new material, introduce a new artist (David), give our young tea girl her first lead with us (Hannah) and let the idiot play an instrument (Jimmy, slide whistle).   On the last point, he must confess that he found it very hard, very counter-intuitive to slide the whistle in and breath out.  Several takes as he was caught slide whistle in and breathing in — not a lot of sounds were made, other than the sounds of 6 pairs of eyes rolling behind him.  That is what the shied is for!

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