This week marks the release of the new Paula Kelley Orchestra EP ‘Airports’ and we’re doing it all hi-tech style with a special pre-release widget from a cool company called Gydget. The widget should appear below and you can listen to the whole EP right here within the confines of my blog, or you may post the Gydget to your own MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, or other page. W00t!
One of the more curious realities of touring is the surprisingly scant amount of time I spend actually experiencing live music. There’s the set I play, of course, but other bands on the bill are more often than not sacrificed in the name of dinner, sleep, silence, or a desperate search for anything fun on the Interweb. Having just completed a 3-decade tour with Lifehouse (ok, three months, but with all the breaks and make-up dates…), I can say that I do now recognize a great majority of their songs, but due in large part to the feet of cement that often separated us when they played, I have very little idea what Jason Wade was singing. Here’s the best I could come up with as I sat in our bunker-like dressing room in Corpus Christie, TX.
And shake a gleaming line
Was out of town
Ken Chang’s a meanie
No, wilted only
Shakira pees a right way
Is numb, festoons
So my you
I’m so why is so to my
Cuz I love my home
Some of, in my hole
I stray, Ragu, fall to the ground
Gonna buy myself a soda pop
I think I probably spaced out on a verse here and there, but you get the idea…
File this under forcing myself to write something, or even under whining if you like, but I feel like I’ve been neglecting the blog in the past couple weeks. This week I’ve had a pretty good excuse. Saturday I played a show in Newburyport, MA with MN, after which we drove 6+ hours to Camden, NJ for the next day’s show. After that show I drove 7 hours back to New England for some excellent family time. Flew to L.A. on Tuesday, flew to Des Moines on Wednesday, drove 3 hours to Kansas City that night (much of the drive being in monsoon conditions), slept 2 hours to wake up and fly to Detroit, then drive to Ann Arbor for a show there tonight. Tomorrow I fly home and then have three shows in SoCal before heading to Tucson on Friday for what will be the last full-band MN show of the summer radio-show season. Phew! Everything’s been going very well, and that’s great, but sleep and decent food have not been happening very much. Electric Lotus and some movie-watchin’ with PK tomorrow will do wonders, but it’s only a start. Thank you for indulging me, unlucky reader.
I spent a good number of years in my 20s suffering a very real and nearly crippling fear of air travel. I avoided it at all costs (even taking a 24-hr train trip in lieu of a 2-hour flight… then the train derailed, ha ha; but that’s another story) and when I did fly I suffered vertigo-like symptoms. It was debilitating and troubling. But, starting with the PKO tour of France in 2004, my fears began to subside, and now that I am flying dozens of times a year I rarely feel the twinge of fear. All that said, arriving at my gate for a connecting flight from Phoenix to Des Moines, I was none too thrilled to be greeted by the giant flat-screen TV blasting out Larry King Live reporting on the breaking news that “Pilots say US Airways is unsafe due to management pressures to conserve fuel.” Guess what airline I’m flying today? Now, what is Amtrak’s phone number…?
This might possibly fall in the too much information category, but something has been baffling me lately, namely my nose. About two years ago I started noticing I was plagued by a scent wherever I went. I couldn’t describe it, and it wasn’t an odor, per se, but it definitely was noticeable. Naturally, I suspected I had developed some odd new body odor, but I then noticed that I could smell it even directly after a shower. So, I remained baffled. The scent disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived and I figured that was that.
However, lately I have found myself going through a series of unavoidable scents, the most frequent of which are slightly stale milk, and freshly cut grass, even when there is NO possibility that such a thing is nearby (driving through the desert, for instance, and also I should note that PK & I never have milk in the house). At some times, I wonder if I am going slightly mad. Other times, I hypothesize that my olfactory system is breaking down with age and perhaps I am on the road to losing my sense of smell all together. The ways our senses work are shockingly complex and in some ways, defy any logic. Could it be that my brain has misplaced its memory of certain scents and so is replacing those with cut grass just because it happens to be handy? Will I lose more scent-memories as time goes on? If so, could I please just set my default scent to something cool, like curry or vanilla? If anyone has insight out there, please do share… thank you.
After sitting on my YouTube account for far too long, I have finally set up my own channel, in which I’ll feature videos of the bands I perform with as well as whatever stupid little things amuse me. So, check out the featured videos as well as the favorites, and leave me some comments — thanks!
Spent a productive day yesterday tracking guitars with Slow Car Crash, a band that features Nick Amoroso, who drummed with Matt on our Fall ‘07 and Winter ‘08 tours. It was a cool challenging session - performed right here at my own Deedling Quail Studios - in that the style is sort of Stevie Wonder-influenced R&B, even verging on “slow jams” on the tunes I was working on. Cool stuff, but I wasn’t sure at first what I was going to do with it. They brought me in to fill in some sonic holes, something I’m adept at, so I had that going in my favor. In preparation, I listened to Off The Wall a couple times (what a GREAT record) and also revisited Tahiti 80’s Wallpaper For the Soul (there were some vocal similarities there, and the album features some great, subtly smooth guitar parts.
Once we had broken the ice, songwriter Omarr and I got along famously. Surprisingly, he and I share shady shred-guitar pasts and were able to throw around obscure speed-freak names at a rapid-fire pace, i.e. “he’s not Chris Impellitteri fast, but at least Marty Friedman fast.” No, I’m not going to take the time to look up links for them. Sorry. As we got rolling, I suggested a few things, and Omarr had some ideas, and after a couple hours, we found that we had created some pretty killer textures and a some cool riffs on top of that. It was one of those sessions that is both smooth and easy, but also adventurous. Good times, topped off with a veg burrito. How can that be wrong?
Every family has their foibles and characteristics and mine, of course, is no exception. As is, I believe, frequently the case, my assessment of my own family was mostly, um, assessed, during my late teenage years and perhaps into my early twenties. I was past the sullen non-communicative phase and was attempting to enter the world on my own two feet and managed to maintain a convivial, if sporadic, relationship with my parents and brother. In that light, I came to the conclusion - often supported by other members of my family, mind you - that were were a reasonably sane family but with a sort of hands-off approach to affection. There wasn’t a lot of “I love you” going on in my house, nor was there very much hugging. We got along tolerably well, but the downside of this sort of coolness is that after a while it tends to become a dual self-fulfilling prophecy / un-examined history.
Yesterday, as I drove from L.A. to Modesto for a show with MN, I had as my companion - as I frequently do - Spot, a plush red-tailed hawk I picked up in Boulder some years ago. Having him there on the drive reminded me of a night many years ago when my family was driving to New Hampshire from our home in Boston to enjoy a weekend of skiing. I was probably no more than 10 years old at the time and my constant companion at this stage of my development (how far I’ve come) was a tiny stuffed rabbit named Snuffy. As we often did, we made a stop in the town of Plymouth, NH, about 30 miles south of our final destination. There may have been some grown-up reason for stopping here, but what I remember most was visiting the Woolworth’s and ogling over their stock of Star Wars action figures (or, more often in this part of the country, knock-offs), or marveling confusedly at the bright-blue vinyl of a Blondes Have More Fun picture-disc, attracted by the novelty of the picture disc and yet completely unable to understand what Rod was doing wrestling with some crazed half-leopard/half-woman creature. I would have to consult my D’Aulaires for more information.
This particular stop over, we trudged through the snow and slush and loaded ourselves back into the station wagon for the final leg of our journey. We were tired, it was late; we all looked forward to a good night’s rest before heading out to the slopes for the one bourgeois indulgence we allowed ourselves. Upon arriving at the ski house tucked into the White Mountains, I discovered that Snuffy was nowhere to be found. I looked all over the back seat of the car, in my duffel bag of whatever it was a 10-year-old found necessary to bring on a weekend away from home (Mexican jumping beans, two packs of baseball cards, and three mismatched socks, perhaps?) and very likely began whimpering like a… well, like a 10-year-old kid. After some damage-control, it was my mother who deduced what had befallen poor Snuffy. Next thing I know, my dad is driving me all the way back to Plymouth - easily an hour round-trip. He pulled the car into a parking spot near where we’d been before. There, on the ground in the next spot over, a little slushy but none the worse for wear, was the bunny. I was so happy, I probably cried all over again. Who needs a hug and a “I love you” when you’ve got that? Happy father’s day, dad.
P.S. Snuffy remains with me to this day, though I think he prefers to avoid road trips.
For the past five days I have been slogging my way around Louisiana and Texas with the Matt Nathanson dance troupe and interpretive Mummenschanz collective. The humidity for the first few days was around 90% and a couple of our shows were outdoors. It’s been exhausting, in that typical summer heat kind of way. And, yes, I know it’s not summer yet, but tell that to the Southeast. The shows have been going well enough - even when we were performing on a stage surrounded by water slides and ferris wheels at Dixie Landin’ in Baton Rouge. What has really caught my notice in the past couple days is how all the freeways, especially in South Texas, look pretty much exactly the same, be they I-10, I-35, I-37, or whatever. There are Taco Cabanas everywhere, and among every block of commerce directly off the route there is a remarkable similarity between the family restaurants, the strip clubs, and the churches. They all look the same. Off-highway architecture is apparently not a diverse art down around these parts. I wonder if the people who frequent these places find the similarity comforting, or if they don’t give it a thought.
As noted in my song-of-the-day, PK and I went to the Wiltern on Friday to see the band Beirut. I first heard of Beirut last year on a music blog and downloaded a song that piqued my interest. A couple weeks later I was in Athens, GA and popped into an indie record shop to buy The Flying Club Cup (iTunes link). I played it a few times in the van, but amid the noise of the road was unable to fully enjoy it, but I definitely liked what I heard. Once home, PK and I were able to truly listen to and appreciate the record. It’s one of a sort of returning breed of indie record where rock instrumentation is shunned in favor of more traditional and orchestral instruments, this time with more panache and less pretense than the late-90s efforts of bands like Of Montreal and Ladybug Transistor. More subdued and - seemingly, sometimes - haphazard than what we do in the Paula Kelley Orchestra, but coming from a similar place. So, of course, we feel an affinity and are happy to have a little bit of company in our love of brass and strings (and more).
Flash forward to the show. The 8-piece band ambled on stage a little late and launched into their set with the beautiful “Nantes” and from there it was a raucous and joyous set, full of many instrument changes, with half of the band at one point picking up a trumpet or a ukulele, or moving to the keyboard set-up for some virtuoso xylophone playing. What was most impressive about the performance, though, was the experience of watching eight talented musicians REALLY enjoying themselves playing real music with depth, vibrance, and unusual flourishes. Drummer Nick Petree sits stiffly at his kit, but plays unusual and often thrilling beats with the most impeccable timing I’ve seen in a long time. The horn players each covered trumpet, euphonium, french horn, and some horn we’d never seen before, the violinist seemed in her own world on stage right, but was always right there and very much in tune. In the middle of it all Zach Condon bellowed away, his voice sometimes bordering on overly theatrical, but always looking so genuine that it just didn’t matter.
We were so into it (PK especially) that we decided to return for their second show on Saturday and were no less rewarded. And I should note that on top of all the vibrancy on stage, what really hit us was the fact that the capacity crowds were dominated by young (meaning high-school age and up) people who were totally enraptured by the band. There is hope for music. I feel like I’m seeing it more and more. And it’s happening organically, which is a beautiful thing. Check out Beirut, have a look at their touring schedule and see a show, pick up the record; you’ll be glad you did.