January 3, 2025
While we're front-loaded on the recording agenda with the 8 or 9 songs we've been playing a lot since summer, we are also planning to rework some songs that have been on the shelf for awhile. Today Dustin wasn't available to run a recording session, so we instead pivoted towards arranging and tweaking a couple of those songs.
It would have been an interesting session to film, because the four of us are each veteran songwriters on our own, with our own sets of tools and experiences. Collaboration can be a messy business, and I feel like one of my most important roles is to help navigate that process to a satisfactory end without anyone feeling like they weren't heard or respected. While we can each be a bit headstrong, we start with the desire to make something work better if we can.
So we got under the hood on a relatively simple song that Lisa and I both felt needed a bit of a different kick in a couple places for energy and dynamics. We tried a handful of different ideas and approaches, and after an hour or so we'd dialed in a couple of chord changes and very minor melody alterations that did the trick to our collective satisfaction. I find that it is easier to dig in when I'm able to voice a “big picture” question about how something affects the overall feel of a song, or sometimes how a song works within a set of songs. And my super-talented bandmates are always willing to discuss those questions, and most of the time something we like better results. It can literally be anything - an energy thing for me, a lyric thing for Lisa or Stephanie, often a “feel” element for Les.
It is quite a wonderful thing to be “in the room where it happens” with these three! I got so wrapped up in what we were doing on several levels that I forgot to take a single picture - even of the snow falling hard outside the studio window. It just added to the beauty of the creativity mystery.
Back to rolling tape next week - a busy couple months on the agenda.