Studio Blog 4 (12-5-07)

2:30pm

I woke up and headed off to the studio. I am tired...this week has been packed with a lot of stuff. 3 long recording sessions in a week, plus a show, plus pre-production. Then tonight I leave for Greenville, SC for a show tomorrow morning for the Meyer's Cancer center, and then tomorrow night I'm getting with Don to work on string arrangements and to hang out a little bit. Friday we're then waking up early and heading off from Greenville to Chatanooga, TN to sing for my cousin's wedding. Then, after the morning wedding, Sarah and I are driving back to Nashville, and at 7pm a private plane is picking, Sarah, Ash and I up at a local airstrip and we are all flying to Pensacola for me to play a solo acoustic show for Marcus Pointe Baptist Church in Pensacola that just worked out at the last minute. Then Monday & Tuesday of next week, I have 2 more tracking sessions at the same place I've been at for these 2 sessions. So, it's 8 days of craziness.

But it's good craziness.

Anyway, I picked up Ash and we headed off to the studio. We got there around 10 and immediately started to load stuff from my hard drive to the session tracks. We are working on "I'm Clean", "Love Is Raining Down" and "Waiting For You" with Will Owsley producing, and Will likes a lot of the pre-production stuff I have in the demos, so we just imported some of the synth and keyboard stuff into these sessions. As soon as I walked in the door, we quickly took care of that.

Right as we were starting on the first song, my manager, Mitch came in to hang out for a while. Mitch and I have gotten to be great friends, so it's always nice to have him around. He was playing skippy at work to come hang out and listen for a while.

Jim Bogios, the drummer for Counting Crows now (and he's played with Sheryl Crow for years, as well as Dixie Chicks and several other major bands), and I hung out for a while as Will got stuff hooked up and ready. Seriously, Counting Crows has been one of my favorite bands for a long time (at one point they were all I listened to) and Adam Duritz has long been a songwriting hero of mine, so to have the drummer that Adam picked for his band playing on my record is an honor and extremely awesome! And on top of all that, Jim Bogios is just a cool, laid back cat who's just a great hang.

Will had lost a bunch of stuff because his Mac crashed so he hadn't had a chance to work out his bass parts, so we decided that today would be just a Jim Bogios day.

The first song we started on was "I'm Clean". We took a couple of minutes to make sure the sound were great and then Jim started to playing. After the first take, we had what we needed. For safety's sake, we took one more take, but when we comped the two takes together, we used the first take and something like 2 bars from the second take. Amazing.

Session players in Nashville are incredible players, but for the most part they are very safe playing...it's really hard to talk a session player into just rocking out, which is good...for the most part you want session players to not detract from singer/songwriter they are playing for. Jim, though, can do that, but comes from a band situation where he's able to show off a little more, which was exactly what I was looking for. He came in and just ROCKED the FREAK OUT!!! So much energy and so in the pocket. I'm in love with Jim Bogios's drumming.

After we finished with "I'm Clean" we immediately went into "Love Is Raining Down". As we were taking the first pass through the song, a rack mount broke on Jim's drum set, so we took an early lunch. Mitch, Steve (the engineer), Ash and I walked down to an Irish pub for lunch while Jim and Will ran off to Fork's Drum closet to grab something to fix the drum set.

We ate and and ran back to the studio. Soon after we got back, Jim and Will got back and we immediately started tracking. For the loops we decided to create live loops with Jim playing, but do some wacked out EQ and compression to make it sound distorted and loopy. So, we decided to break up the drums and "loops". We first took 2 takes of drums and had all that we needed. Once again, Jim nailed it like crazy. Then we took 2 takes of the "loops" after Steve had changed a bunch of settings and now we're comping those together to make a track.

3:30pm

We started working on "Waiting For You" about 30 minutes and we have what we need. Simply incredible. Jim Bogios went in and nailed an extremely complex drum part in 1 take. I seriously have never worked with a drummer as freakishly great as Jim. We're just listening and comping and then I'm going home. Shortest studio day yet. Amazing.

I can't wait for you guys to hear this.