It’s raining in L.A. (All of you in the Minneapolises of the world are rolling your eyes: “Yeah, so? I got frostbite walking to my car today.”) It’s throwing me for a loop—the nonstop sunny days have made me a stranger to damp. Funny how much climate can dictate my sense of place, the color of my memories. Santa Monica in the rain starts feeling awfully like Seattle. San Francisco in a blizzard would become Pittsburgh. And so on.
Whoever is crafting the Press Release about what I’m up to, bless his/her heart, has been swamped with other tasks. Whenever that finally arrives, I’ll upload it to /news and send it out the mailing list with due fanfare. But for now, here’s the skinny:
This album is my first project under the auspices of Rounder Records. A good chunk of my own CD collection—Grant-Lee Phillips, Hem, Madeleine Peyroux—has the Rounder/Zoë stamp on it, so I am most pleased to join their ranks. Troy Hansbrough, a fellow who seems entirely too down-to-earth to actually be head of A&R at a record label, told me he’d sent my demos to one Larry Klein, producer. “You mean the guy who scores films and worked with Joni Mitchell for years?” I thought. “Wow, wouldn’t that be fun. Wonder if he’d be remotely interested.” He was. And here we are.
Recent touring companions Marika Hughes and Dina Maccabee make numerous contributions; others include Carla Kihlstedt and Mark Orton of Tin Hat Trio, drummer Jay Bellerose, guitarist Dean Parks, and Frank Marocco on accordion. Oh, and one song features what can only be called the Vienna Girls Choir.
It occurred to me (somewhere in the midst of explaining to my parents what it is, exactly, that I spend all my time doing these days) that the process of making a record is a lot like filmmaking, and the roles are almost direct analogues. I’m the screenwriter and the lead actor. Larry is the director. Helik Hadar, with his microphones and faders, is the cinematographer and editor. As actor I study my lines, develop my character in my head, discuss scenes with the director, and then just wait for them to set up the shot and call “action!” As screenwriter, most of my work took place last year. But I sit beside the director, watching the dailies, making sure the script is coming to life the way I originally hoped. Lucky for me, it’s painless work. Larry has a sure hand and an open mind.
At night I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. I talk with friends in graduate school and find that I sorely miss…well, studying. An armchair scholar is at the mercy of her own laziness, and there are times when deadlines and a professor’s interrogatory gaze would come in handy.
Been absorbing Imogen Heap‘s latest, the lovely and intricate Speak For Yourself. The woman puts all my ex-programmer-ness to shame. She produced and engineered the whole record; I can hardly get QuickPunch working in Pro Tools. However, I can make cut-and-paste quasi-techno:
garageband_test.mp3 (May 5, 2005)
Next on the shopping list: Duncan Sheik‘s White Limousine (another Rounder/Zoë release, incidentally), and a recording of the Debussy String Quartet. Yeeeeees.