Wednesday was a picture-perfect spring day in Northern New Jersey. We weren’t starting in the studio until noon, since Ben, in addition to being a grammy-winning producer, has started a yoga studio in town and teaches there several times a week. Wednesday morning was one of his teaching times…so I decided to take advantage of the extra time by sleeping in a bit, and then trying out a fancy-schmancy gym that Ben had mentioned. I’ve been going to a really basic little gym here in town – I got a promo deal where I get 2 weeks’ access dirt cheap – but I’d heard interesting things about this other place, eponymously (and presumably not modestly) named “The Gym”. I took some absolutely beautiful back-country roads to get there…I got lost a bunch of times, but have some wonderful photos to show for it... 
The area I drove through is called “Saddle River”, and after looking it up on Craigslist, it looks like homes there run around $2 million. While I question the need for 62 bathrooms in a 6-bedroom house, I suppose these New Jersey folks know what they’re doing. Maybe they drink a LOT of water during the day, or have really small bladders.
Anyway, the drive over to The Gym was gorgeous. Once at The Gym, the eye was accosted by any number of well-appointed housewives with fake…well, EVERYTHING…who were all coiffed and made up for their journey to personal wellness. How they can sweat in all that makeup, I’ll never know. Anyway, The Gym was clearly a place to see and be seen, but the equipment wasn’t much better than at my little, messy gym. That said, The Gym did have two things to recommend it: a bevy of masseuses waiting to knead your tired muscles (which I took advantage of a couple of days later), and the best friggin’ shower I’ve ever seen.
So. Ben and I worked on two songs on Wednesday – a cover of a punk song called Anything, Anything, and one of mine called We Both Know. They both turned out well enough…I was especially pleased with the punk cover. A free clip of the original tune can be found HERE, if you’re curious; I’ve stripped it, slowed it down, and made it an acoustic piece that’s really pretty cool (if I do say so myself). One thing about recording in someone’s suburban house, though, which I guess stands to reason but still caught me by surprise…you have to stop recording whenever the next door neighbor mows his lawn (which appears to happen daily at noon around here), or (as happened Wednesday) the neighbor across the street hires a company to use a power washer to strip the paint from his exterior walls. The microphones Ben uses are really, really sensitive, which means that all that noise bleeds onto the vocal and guitar tracks. So we had to take a series of breaks during the worst of it.
Wednesday evening I took Ben and his girlfriend out to dinner at Varka, their favorite restaurant in town. They have all sorts of fresh-caught seafood that they put out on ice for you to choose from. If you pay them extra, they will liberate the lobsters they have tied up, alive, on the ice. OK, that last part isn’t true, but I wish it were…it just seems so cruel to leave the poor guys alive and aware until some schmuck decides he wants to eat it.
The next day (Thursday) we recorded two more songs, I Do and If I Were a Book. On Friday I went back to The Gym for a morning massage, and Ben and I spent the rest of the afternoon recording Only Always. My voice was not at all strong on Friday, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to re-cut those vocals another time. Blech. Overall, though, my voice has been getting stronger…it’s just allergies that are giving me trouble at this point, and I’m hoping that some new remedies suggested by Facebook friends will do the trick for that (Alavert and a mullein tincture seemed to work pretty well today). Friday evening I went and visited an old friend of mine, Steve Sirbu, and his family in Teaneck (about 10 miles away). I’ve known Steve for a long time…we went to the same Jewish summer camp as kids (Camp Swig), and we roomed together for a while in college…he’s a rabbi now, and he invited me to come to services, and teach a song as well, which was lovely (I taught the congregation Debbie Pinto’s version of Oseh Shalom, for those of you who follow such things).
Today we recorded our final song – a cover of Walking in Memphis. I saved this song for last for several reasons. First and foremost, you should know that Walking In Memphis was the song that launched Ben’s career back in 1991, when he recorded the original with Marc Cohn (they won a Grammy for their efforts), so I had to do a LOT of cajoling to get him to even entertain the thought of working with me to cover the tune. Ultimately, he agreed to work with me on it, provided that he reserved the right to determine whether the song ultimately gets put on the album. With that in mind, I really wanted to impress him with an arrangement that felt new and, most importantly, sufficiently different from the original that he would be excited about it. To that end I’ve been working on a new arrangement on my own for the last few evenings, and when I finally shared it with him this morning, I was thrilled to see that he was really starting to get into it.
Many of you have expressed interest in seeing how the whole process of arranging and recording a song works, and thanks to my video camera, I'm finally able to share that process with you. The first video clip is about 30 minutes long (video quality is low so I could fit it all on the blog, but the audio is good), and shows Ben and I creating a new arrangement of Walking in Memphis:
The second video clip is short...a little glimpse into the recording process:
And in the third clip, you can watch as a very rough version of the recorded song takes shape!
With the basics of all 14 songs now recorded, and a female vocalist coming in tomorrow to do background vocals on several songs, we spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the songs and creating “rough mixes”. This involves Ben marrying a vocal track to a guitar track, adding some limited effects, and adjusting the various levels so that it sounds halfway-decent. I already posted one example for you earlier this week – a rough mix of a song called Wherever You Are (click on the link, and then the song title, to listen); I’ve posted another rough mix tonight for you to listen to, called Hearts in the Graveyard (just click on the song title to listen). We then sent the rough mixes to our female vocalist, so she can listen to them and do some prep work. I’ll look forward to posting an updated mix or two, with her vocals included, in my next blog installment.
That’s all for now. I LOVE to see your thoughts, comments, and questions – whether on Facebook, or directly in the Blog – so please do let me hear from you! It’s great to feel connected, especially with the 3,000 miles distance separating me from so many people that I love. Thanks for being there, and THANKS FOR LISTENING!
Steve
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