Friday
Jun102005
running out of titles for these things
Friday, June 10, 2005 at 10:24AM
This week has been a pretty fun one. I've had three different projects in the studio on different days, and they've all been unique and interesting. Monday, Randall, Garett and I began a new track for the Caedmon's record. There's this song that Randall wrote a while ago, that we've sung at church for years, and at the last minute the band decided to do it. In our version, I played bass and guitar, Randall played piano, and Garett played some killer tabla and shaker stuff. Danielle is going to sing it and I think it's going to turn out beautifully.
Then Billy Cerveny came over with a half-finished project of a friend of his. Basically, this older woman, who is an inner-city social worker who writes folk songs like Joni Mitchell, started a little album with somebody down in Florida. The recording was pretty rough, so Billy, Cason and I spent two days trying to clean it up, and adding little bits of love on it here and there. The songs were pretty cool, even if the source recordings were at times a bit frustrating. I know nothing about this woman, but I know from her songs that she loves other people pretty incredibly, and that she does it because Jesus loves her. It was a pretty humbling experience, and I hope I get to meet her someday.
Yesterday I started a record with a singer-songwriter from Knoxville, TN named Greg Adkins. I typically don't work on records without knowing the person first, (the few times I have I've had a couple awkward experiences) but this guy wrote me an e-mail and directed me to a website where he had been tracking an interesting project of his own. He decided to write and record a new song every week for a year. They're all up there, you can download all 52 of them. I just thought that was so cool that I should talk more with him. He came over to Nashville yesterday and we went through pre-production, which is going through each song and editing and arranging and making sure you have the right songs in their right places. It was a lot of fun. He's a cool guy with some pretty great songs. I think it's going to be a fun project.
Last night, Alison and I worked on our guest room/study/library room for a while. It's been a tornado zone since the baby and toe. I had a pile of books about three feet tall and three feet wide that needed to be shelved. All through high school I worked at a library, so I'm very anal about making sure all my books are in the right order. I use a fake junior dewey decibal system, because I'm so weird. Before I got married I was a pretty avid used book store junkie. I'd spend three bucks and come home with ten new ones every week. I'm trying to get back into it. I've found a used bookstore not too far from us that's pretty great. It's called Rhino Books. It's run by a couple old songwriter hippies. They wrote some huge song in the 60's, I can't remember which, and used the royalties to open the bookstore. I love Nashville.
Anway, in our cleaning we found old journals and notebooks, and spent quite a while reading them out loud to eachother and laughing at how awesome we were back when. We found some great early references to each other that were pretty funny. My favorite was when Alison had written that she and I had talked every day for a week, and maybe it's because "he likes me, or maybe he's just bored." We also read through our freshman years of college, and couldn't believe all the people that had been such big parts of our lives, or that we thought were so cool that turned out not to be, and all those early college relationships. It was a funny little walk down Memory Lane. Unfortunately, all my old journals were sprinkled with lyrics to songs that were, how should I say it, "not quite good enough for Better Than This" which means they were vomit-inducingly awful. She decided to make up new melodies and sing through them all. Little Mrs. Ten Toes was too fast for me to get it away from her, so I eventually had to give up and revel in my eighteen-year old songwriting awesomeness. And no, none of you will ever hear of these lyrics again. Forget they exist. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Well, Greg's coming over in about 45 minutes and I need to shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day. Eggo's here we come!
Then Billy Cerveny came over with a half-finished project of a friend of his. Basically, this older woman, who is an inner-city social worker who writes folk songs like Joni Mitchell, started a little album with somebody down in Florida. The recording was pretty rough, so Billy, Cason and I spent two days trying to clean it up, and adding little bits of love on it here and there. The songs were pretty cool, even if the source recordings were at times a bit frustrating. I know nothing about this woman, but I know from her songs that she loves other people pretty incredibly, and that she does it because Jesus loves her. It was a pretty humbling experience, and I hope I get to meet her someday.
Yesterday I started a record with a singer-songwriter from Knoxville, TN named Greg Adkins. I typically don't work on records without knowing the person first, (the few times I have I've had a couple awkward experiences) but this guy wrote me an e-mail and directed me to a website where he had been tracking an interesting project of his own. He decided to write and record a new song every week for a year. They're all up there, you can download all 52 of them. I just thought that was so cool that I should talk more with him. He came over to Nashville yesterday and we went through pre-production, which is going through each song and editing and arranging and making sure you have the right songs in their right places. It was a lot of fun. He's a cool guy with some pretty great songs. I think it's going to be a fun project.
Last night, Alison and I worked on our guest room/study/library room for a while. It's been a tornado zone since the baby and toe. I had a pile of books about three feet tall and three feet wide that needed to be shelved. All through high school I worked at a library, so I'm very anal about making sure all my books are in the right order. I use a fake junior dewey decibal system, because I'm so weird. Before I got married I was a pretty avid used book store junkie. I'd spend three bucks and come home with ten new ones every week. I'm trying to get back into it. I've found a used bookstore not too far from us that's pretty great. It's called Rhino Books. It's run by a couple old songwriter hippies. They wrote some huge song in the 60's, I can't remember which, and used the royalties to open the bookstore. I love Nashville.
Anway, in our cleaning we found old journals and notebooks, and spent quite a while reading them out loud to eachother and laughing at how awesome we were back when. We found some great early references to each other that were pretty funny. My favorite was when Alison had written that she and I had talked every day for a week, and maybe it's because "he likes me, or maybe he's just bored." We also read through our freshman years of college, and couldn't believe all the people that had been such big parts of our lives, or that we thought were so cool that turned out not to be, and all those early college relationships. It was a funny little walk down Memory Lane. Unfortunately, all my old journals were sprinkled with lyrics to songs that were, how should I say it, "not quite good enough for Better Than This" which means they were vomit-inducingly awful. She decided to make up new melodies and sing through them all. Little Mrs. Ten Toes was too fast for me to get it away from her, so I eventually had to give up and revel in my eighteen-year old songwriting awesomeness. And no, none of you will ever hear of these lyrics again. Forget they exist. These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Well, Greg's coming over in about 45 minutes and I need to shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day. Eggo's here we come!
Reader Comments (6)
"fake junior dewey decibal system"...
"These aren’t the droids you’re looking for...."
Thanks for making me laugh this morning. :-)
"Little Miss Ten-Toes..."
Toe-Envy much? ;)
Actually, those are the lyrics I'm looking for ... as I build "AndrewOsengaSucks.net". I'm going to let your buddies Rickay and Shinelook run it. ;)
Breakfast at 10:15 a.m. I'm jealous.
hey, i'm glad that you're doing greg's thing. tell him hi for me, and that knoxville misses him.
so no B-sides album, I guess...
Happens to me a lot as well. I have a big, fat file in my filing cabinet called, "old songs I wrote that suck." My wife has yet to find it, and I hope she never does.
However, I'm just too sentimental to throw them all away