To say yesterday’s show was a commercial failure would not be an understatement, but I did get to have a nice drunken conversation with a dude I met when he was 22, who is now moving and shaking in Pittsburgh pretty well. We’re going to plan some shows soon — more on that as it develops.
Towards the end, Ryan Miller showed up, so I played him all of the songs for the new album.
Ryan has long been a source of air in my sails: when we ran into each other for the first time after high school, he hooked me up with my first solo gig after I had decided to keep a separate show going outside of Stone Soup’s. It was a Wednesday at the Interstellar Café, which ended up yielding about four years’ worth of Wednesdays as it passed through three owners’ hands, and as many names. When he left that place, I kept doing shows in that space but also followed him to his new job at 1,001 Nights. (Don’t look for either of these places — they’re not there anymore.)
He had a studio on 17th St in the South Side, at which we had started working on a solo album to follow Glutton’s Dozen, full of songs that had been considered too dark/depressing for Stone Soup’s folk-rocky tastes (someday I’ll rant for a bit about how frustrating it can be to have a band that plays mostly your original material tell you which of your material works for them — in retrospect, when those kind of things started coming up, I should have just quit those bands and moved on, but hey, what can you do.) Once Stone Soup had called it quits for good, we set about putting a new band together, that we named after the solo album-in-progress’ working title: Dead Pressed Flowers was our baby.
DPF was a five-member powerhouse, with the appearance of a three-guitar attack, but which really set itself apart because of Ryan’s technical acumen, as he played his guitar through a midi filter and imbued our songs with flairs ranging from synth to strings without ever sounding crazy or out of place. Our drummer, Erica, was a crazy bastard who beat the tar out of every drum she ever met, while our bassist, Justin, was already well-known in the scene for bringing super-melodic lines to every project her worked in. Also, Gar was there, which meant I had my emotional center.
Both in and out of our working relationships, Ryan has been my strongest and best critic, always offering his honest opinion about my stuff (whether I asked or not), and making sure I understood that I could always do better and to not try was to become complacent and stupid. I get nervous when he’s at a show, because I never know what he’s going to like. Fortunately, he liked most of what I was putting out there.
We went back to his place after the show and laid down backing tracks for Gary Musisko’s “Diamond Mines,” a bittersweet tune about a relationship in decline (right in my wheelhouse), then concentrated for a bit on “Two People Made This Mess,” the album I want to make this year.
Loading all of the .wav files into his computer was simple, plugging them into Nuendo simpler still, and the conversation that ensued about mixing and our philosophies on auto-tune could not have left us feeling more in sync. We agreed that I’m going to finish the tracking on my end and send him the finished tracks for mixing in his basement studio.
I think our sound is going to be great, and surprise a lot of people. Which is what you’re supposed to do, no?