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In association with Kenny Schick’s Bourbon Friday! Have a Pour and Listen More!!
On today’s installment of New Music Bourbon Friday we have a song from Raffy Espiritu’s brand new EP (Promise) called ‘Let Spring Time Bloom’ …. Thought we’d start with this one as it’s still spring, and there are many things in bloom all around. Now despite the cheery title, the song does have some darker sounds, as it talks about moving into a brighter place from a darker place (in my mind, the winter to spring transition). Raffy writes a lot of songs that to me have a latin vibe, and this is one of those, so I made the main instrument that starts the whole song nylon string acoustic, and some bubbling congas join in. The song is mostly in a minor key, but…the end chord (spring) ends major… ok music geeks… this kind of chord/harmonic device has a name… let’s see who is up on their music theory…name this harmonic device! 🙂 Often on these songs of Raffy’s, I’ll do a whole string section, but I kept this one a bit more stripped down with a lone violin…. Sabine provided her angelic backing vocals…. I have a fun nylon string solo in there…. I was going to do an arranged string section there… but… I’ve done that on other songs of Raffy’s, so I did something a bit different this time. Enjoy this soothing piece of music with a beverage of your choice!
Brought to you by your good friends at Bourbon Friday, a subsidiary of B3Pmusic.com, we bring you New Music Friday – Have a Pour, Listen More! Today’s feature came out a few months back from Lightholder, who is Sean Lightholder and all his incarnations of musical friends (and family). ‘Prom Date’ is a duet between Sean and his partner Kristen, and it’s just a very sweet song about finding love and romantic experiences a bit later in life than most people. It’s definitely a theme I can relate to, as I was a late starter on all that stuff, and high school was awkward for me in that regard…haha. So was college, for that matter……:) This song came to me pretty well done, and my job on this one was to compose the string arrangement to fit with the existing parts, then mix and master. All the parts are so great, with Steve Kritzer on mandolin, and Dawn Ellerbeck on bass. I’m not sure if there is anyone else besides Sean on the rest of the instruments. It was really fun to work on these strings with Sean…..my first version was pretty elaborate….I think Sean referred to ‘Eleanor Rigby’…haha….. we finally got it to just a sweet part that the music could just float on top of. Mixing is always a fun part of the process for me, so that was indeed fun, and the goal was just to really feature the vocals, and some of those great instrumental parts….. This song began apparently when Sean got a banjo and wanted to write something playing his new toy. You can hear it right out the top of the tune…. I really enjoy the mandolin playing as well.
New Music Friday, brought to you by your good friends at Bourbon Friday…. ‘Have a pour and listen more’…this little tag line is particularly good for today’s featured artist, Kurt Gundersen, who is known for his very tall pours of wine. This song did come out in the ladder part of last year, but we weren’t doing the NMF thing yet, so I’m gonna go back and feature some stuff from the second half of last year as well as brand new stuff. I’m picking this song today for a few reasons: it has a some interesting stuff to talk about from a production standpoint, and it also talks about the place I grew up—Kurt also lived there when I met him, but he is in Maine now, so we both have fond memories of the Bay Area as ‘home’. What you will notice about this song is that it goes through some different feels and tempos—there are a number of songs on this album that have more extreme changes than this one, shifting styles and even time signatures. On Kurt’s albums, he plays acoustic guitar and sings (obviously), and then I do the rest. Some artists send me demos done to a click, but I don’t do that with him, as he does have purposeful changes in some of his songs, and I need to know how he is feeling it. I was talking to another artist yesterday about how most people just select a tempo and then that’s it for the song. I don’t necessarily do that, as I’m really trying to imagine a production as the best possible ‘performance’ of a song—like what the song should sound like live, but with the control and great sonics that you can achieve in a studio setting. That means if I imagine performing it, and I feel like a chorus should speed up or something, then that’s what the music wants. So with Kurt’s demos, I follow areas like that and map out the entire session before I even start recording parts. This song has those parts that go into a 6/8 kind of thing and then hit these places he wanted long pauses…. In those pauses a created ‘sound scapes’, or ‘dream scapes’ to sort of reflect the trippy-ness of it all…it is Golden Gate after all, and I was imagining those days of the Haight-Ashbury scene. This one gets rockin’ pretty good too in parts…had fun with effects and things in the transitions, trying to keep that reflective, dream like quality. The whole album is really a great listen—it has its REM kinda vibes, but also explores many other musical territories. Cheers!!
Today’s New Music Friday features Modern Dynamics again, as they roll out singles from the new EP. BethAnne has several ‘themes’ she loves, one of those being ‘westerns’—those stories about the rugged days of the Wild West. ‘Carrillo’ is about ‘the Mexican Robin Hood’. I wasn’t sure if this was a fictional character from BethAnne’s imagination or not, but I looked it up and found one Joaquín Murrieta Carrillo who is indeed cited as ‘the Mexican Robin Hood’, or ‘Robin Hood of El Dorado’ (believed to be inspiration for fictional character Zorro). With Modern Dynamics, the focus is always BethAnne’s vocal and acoustic guitar, and Randy’s melodic electric guitar leads. My job is to support that and the story line in the most compelling and appropriate way. In the case of this song, I wanted to make it feel theatrical and have that border town vibe, so out came accordion, and of course latin inspired drumming, with lots of tom and timbale work. I’m always a fan of using toms instead of cymbals, so this was right up my alley already. Give it a listen along with…well…maybe tequila in this case! Lol…. I’ll stick to my bourbon on this bourbon Friday, but…. Enjoy this song with whatever beverage brings you joy.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stella on a number of songs now. Some I’ve done a lot of instrumentation for, and others I added parts to enhance tracks that already existed. On Background Noise, I ended up doing all the instruments: drums, bass, cello, and a pile of guitar parts. Stella had a sound in mind—namely, she wanted it to have a Beabadoobee vibe, who is an artist that mixes really dirty sounds with often pretty melodies (I hear influences like the Breeders, Pixies, and a lot of stuff I grew up on). Since the melody is quite pretty, and since the demo had a very different ‘groove’ to it (the demo was just her singing with her acoustic guitar), Stella and I spent a good deal of time trying to solve the ‘getting it dirty and thrashy sounding enough’ problem. The groove of her acoustic guitar in the original demo had a more syncopated thing going on, and so the initial drum part incorporated that ‘skip’ in the rhythm which made it a bit too ‘cheery’. After some discussions, I finally started to realize that the beat needed to be much more straight—just more a chunky eighth note kind of thing. Of course, the dirty bass and guitar sound were also part of it, as were the more naive indie type of repetitious melodies in the guitar parts. I sent the session over to Steve Glaze at Tone Freq (with my panning and levels about where I thought were best), then Stella added her vocals and Steve mixed and mastered it.
Working on ‘I’m So Sweet’ for Julie was a lot of fun. When I got it from her, it was piano, her vocal, and drums by Mike Freitas. Mike had played on an electronic kit, so I got midi, which was great, as I have an extensive library of drum sounds, so I was able to choose a kit that was really stylistically and period specific to this old time-y genre. My main task was to come up with horn parts. I started with clarinet, and that really gave it the right flavor. I added in tenor sax to get the harmonies started, and put in some temporary note ideas on alto sax that I sent to Vinnie Ciesielski, a local trumpet player. One of the main things we really wanted for this song was tuba to hold down the bass. I composed a midi tuba part, and Vinnie had a friend, Scott Hearn, who played tuba and also added trombone. Julie’s husband Joe Simpson played guitar on this as well. It came out like one big party, and it was just the right medicine for me personally, as it was just fun in a time that often feels heavy. Julie is always writing in so many different styles that I never know what she’s going to send me next. Cover by Sabine.
As with all the Modern Dynamics songs, the feature is always BethAnne’s vocal and story. This recent collection of songs was fun in that there were some songs with a bit more of a ‘punk-y’ vibe… that individualistic stand for something better and more honest. This one is sort of in the middle, as it’s not as aggressive as some of the others that will be released in the near future, but it gave me a bit of that late 70’s/early 80’s post-punk/pop feel, harkening back to bands like Elvis Costello, XTC, The Jam, etc. There was an upbeat quality that made me think of those early XTC albums and Costello, so I used a transistor organ—a sound I don’t use to often, but I just kept hearing it on this one. Randy’s melodic guitar solos also helped inspire that vibe. As we were near done, Beth Anne wondered if maybe the choruses didn’t quite have enough angst, so that prompted me to add some crunchy octave guitar parts on the choruses and a few little lead fills to give it a bit more of that angsty energy. I did more back up vocals on this album I think, as we have found my voice blends well with BethAnne’s, and of course, I’m always a sucker for harmonies… 🙂
Raffy’s new song ‘Dance for the People’ has a reference to a snake charmer, so I wanted to get some of that ‘vibe’ in this song. The song itself has fairly traditional singer songwriter type chord changes, and the music played by snake charmers is played on an instrument called the Pungi, which is a reed instrument that only has 7 holes usually, and then a drone note… so it’s in a single key… not a chromatic instrument. The scale is called a Punnagavarali raga, and it has I guess what we would call a sort of minor sound to it. I tried using some virtual instruments similar to it which would allow me to use notes not on the original instrument to fit the song, but I wasn’t loving it. I thought I’d try a clarinet, and that wasn’t quite it, but it did feel more human and organic, played with some inflections that one might hear in that music. I ended up getting it more ‘grating’ by putting it through a distortion pedal and echo. So that was a fun adventure! I read that public snake charming was made illegal in 1991. Anyway… enjoy the song, which to me is about recognizing and sharing your own unique talents. Cover art and video by Sabine.
