travelling

now playing: marty higgins, "big city lights"



good music...i mean really good music...it's like transportation. you put it on, and it doesn't matter what's going on around you. it doesn't matter that you overslept this morning and got to work over an hour late, or that the entire mexican executive hierarchy has descended upon headquarters (timed perfectly for the christmas party) with laptops in hand, and they all have a fuckin' problem that they expect you to fix before they retreat back across the border...it doesn't matter that your kitchen table is literally littered with parts from a potentially unfixable laptop that's going to break your heart to have to deliver the diagnosis for...it doesn't matter that, at approximately 3:45am this morning while you were working on it, you unknowingly put a 2" scratch in the kitchen table somehow (it had to have been me...no one else has been able to even see the kitchen table for over two weeks now, and it looks fresh) - and you know you're going to catch hell for it.

it doesn't matter that you have to scramble to leave work to drive to philadelphia for the second time in less than a week for a gig that you're not really terribly pumped about playing...it doesn't matter that you're staring a mechanic's bill for the van in the face, now that you've made an appointment to take it in next week for the whole stuttering/jerking thing that it's been doing, or that two people who'd committed to pricey PC repairs have yet to pay up...


all of this will matter at some point...but when i put marty's record on, that stuff goes away.

marty has the power to make me feel...and not much in this world has that power these days.


i can't remember who it was - i want to say it was blake, but i can't remember for sure if it was him or not - asked me (about this record) why marty had both todd and i come in to play on it. he was curious as to why marty didn't just have me play everything...and to my ear, the answer seems obvious, but i could see why someone else would ask.

the non-musical reason would simply be that we're all good friends, and marty wanted us both on the record. but i think (and marty has never said this, this is purely my opinion) that todd seems to fit these songs.

while there are obvious reasons why todd and i should have very similar styles, that's not necessarily the case. todd watched me for a long time, but the fact is - he's got his own voice on the instrument. todd has this lazy technique - i know that sounds negative, but it's not...quite the contrary, in fact. todd will stretch a slide or a bend out well past where i would, and he does it to great effect. for instance, the sound that so many people equate with steel guitar - the slide of one note into the next - something as simple as that...todd will take that transition and milk it for all the tension it's worth from the first note into the final one, and it'll make you ache. he's really the best at that, that david lindley-style slow, melodic, single note stuff. i can do it, and i can do it quite well, but todd has just developed his own unique voice on the instrument, with regards to that style....and i think it makes perfect sense that marty asked him to do those songs. they're better for it.

marty also had a top-shelf cello player put tracks down on his last album...and she adds a layer of sorrow onto those songs that just kills me..."driving her home", the song that closes the album, and "california" - amazing work.


i'm going to have to put the woo on marty to come to the sterley street sonic playground to do his next record...i'd love to lock him in the house and keep him there until we had thirteen or fourteen songs down on tape.

blake told me earlier this week that his brother-in-law michael (another aunt pat expatriate) had cut an entire record in a weekend - quite the antithesis to blake's process, to be sure.

i don't know if i could do that or not...'course, one doesn't know until one tries.


well, i've got one more visit from my repairman and i can put the pieces back in place and get back to work on putting the room right. then i'm going to jump headfirst into the jodi project, i think. it's time. i'm also going to be getting some leftover cubicle walls from the company to use as baffles around the drums, and i'm going to build a custom enclosure for muffling guitar amps, too.


now that i'm staring all this time off in the face, it all seems possible.