no room for hipsters

(from Levon)

hello busy people who have taken the time or somehow reached this sentence by means of choice or by my lucky web trafficking.  I doubt you have taken your time to read about how another person is busy, nor do I fail to realize that we are all busy, but anyone reading these sentences is for a time doing the same thing: wondering where I am taking you with all of this talk of busyness.

Today I only wish to relay pertinent facts to my longtime readers who are curious as to the story of the flight of the walkers.

At last, we have caught our breath and welcomed a return to some sense of stability.  We have only a car load of belongings and sleep on a futon but we are both in a place of growth, and breathing deeply as a result.  Productivity comes in larger doses without boundless stress or a complete disarray of personal space.  What we have is easy to organize, and our obligations I can count on one hand.  After that, rock it on out.

So now to the facts.  Ashley is a nanny for a family nearby, and being Ashley, she is also contacting many places in order to exhibit in the coming months.  She has a studio space given to her by our sister Cortney’s dad where she havens away, free of the household’s peering in on the progress.

I am landscaping during the weeks, a job where I came highly recommended by my bass player (Jimits Cameron), and together we slit-seed lawns and ride in a truck, talking about the songs we ought to cover and ones that would be funny, but we shouldn’t.  Weekends I’m catering parties and weddings.

Every spare moment of mine goes to recording, memorizing covers, and rehearsing with my new band in our space located in an office storage building.

Let me tell you a little bit more about this recording project.  As you may know, it was written in New York City about our experiencs and perspective there and subsequently recorded at Grace Acres Farm (Rebekah and Frankie Campbell’s) near Washington D.C. in their farmhouse basement.  I borrowed guitars, drums, and random objects and played them along with various keyboards into the internal microphone on my laptop.  On the third day of doing vocals I realized that this microphone sounded better than any I had, so without exception my album was recorded with garageband plus the mic installed above the screen.

Grace Acres Studio

Upon arriving at Virginia Beach last month, I had 5 of the 8 tracks done.  Recording in a 800 sq ft house with four people all on different schedules is difficult.  My audio engineering abilities were laughable.  But I am a big shot producer, a captivating rockstar and a prolific songwriter; all according to my new indie label which is also based on this laptop.  You know, free recording software is more powerful than anything the Beatles ever had.  And iTunes makes for pretty inexpensive worldwide distribution.  All I need is to be discovered by the right person, and I suppose that right person will have to be me.

I have spent a lot of time in professional studios, on the clock with some great engineers who turn out a great product.  But the music I am making now by myself is better.  Yes, it has that Brooklyn lo-fi, raw performance feel to it.  It is full of imperfections, hisses, finger fumbles, and even some flat notes.  The music is about some people who are bravely and audaciously trying to live the way they feel they should.  Where the resources fall short, creativity has space.  When you are figuring out where you need to be going, there will be mistakes.  Some of them are good to leave like that.  The tracks that I built on were sometimes the takes that were recorded in my Harlem apartment just so that I wouldn’t forget the song when I got home after work.  I jumble the words because they weren’t written down yet, but you can hear the bustle of 5th Avenue where I was taking a walk when I wrote the song.  I would rather have that than studio perfection done somewhere else.

As I sit here now I can only guess at the hours I’ve spent fine tuning my mixes, editing, and  recording on this screen.  I’ve layered my voice repeatedly and probably played 30 instruments into it. It may be true that I have slacked on the blog, but you couldn’t peel this computer from my face last week, and I thought headphones were my real ears.  My drummer, Stamps Morrisett of Layercake Studios in VA Beach is doing the final mastering and I will have a finished copy soon enough.

These have been the facts.

For some reality saucy drama, I may start telling stories about our NYC adventure that I couldn’t say when we were there.  We didn’t want anybody losing sleep over us.  Okay, no hooks people, this is the Flight of the Walkers, the daily story of hope.  Back to daily we shall be.

Tags: 5th avenue, daily story of hope, garageband, grace acres farm, jimits cameron, layercake studios, lo fi recording, slit seeding, stamps morrisett