Liner Notes - Everything Changed

Well this record is quite true to a jam ethic in one sense - there was zero pre production or planning involved... Two band lineups, another record recorded inbetween, and 6 months after the first session it was completed. It all started with a one day visit to Bennett Studios on October 12, 2009. The players in the first session were me, Ron Thaler on drums, Pete Remm on keys, and Art Sadowsky on bass. This was the main lineup for Heavy Road up to this point, and we didn't have any recordings; other than the day 2 jam we did (a live 2 track demo CD we recorded of our second rehearsal). The idea was to sneak in some recording before Ron did one of his trips overseas and at least get the ball rolling. All we were able to schedule was one day.

The session produced some interesting jams. Unfortunately for most of the songs the session was a bust. Art had done a gig the night before, was up all night getting to the studio, and wasn't in top form. This affected the vibe in such a way where the recording of the regular songwriting stuff suffered. But at the same time I think it had a lot to do with the success of one jam in particular, which later became Bike in the Brook.

It took a few weeks to figure out what I was going to do with these recordings. None of the songs with lyrics were useable, except for Blue Jeans - which especially had a cool vibe thanks to Pete's choice piano ideas and Ron's grooviness. The jams were good though, and I knew I would use what would later be called Drift, as well as Bike in the Brook. There were also two jams which were wide open enough and which gave me lyrical ideas that I decided could be worked kind of backwards into more of a song format. One of these would become All This Love. The second one became a tune called You're the One. Unfortunately, some of the production issues that affected this first session couldn't be overcome at mixdown. You're the One wound up actually getting cut out of the CD last minute at masterdisk.

So by December I was still self producing, just visiting the studio when I could and doing some vocal and guitar overdubs on the tunes to move things forward. At the same time, me and Pete were looking for a backup drummer so we could still gig while Ron was in New Zealand. It was this process that led us to bass player Jon Cornell, a good friend of Pete's. Jon had done a ton of stuff in the city, from jazz to rock, commercials to major label gigs, and he was also a fill in guy for the Saturday Night Live band. Needless to say, Jon could tear it up.

Well Jon said he thought he could get Jakubu Griffin involved which is kind of an interesting story. He invited him down, but wouldn't tell him anything about the project. The reason being Jakubu is a bigtime jazz guy in the city who has played with everyone, and Jon figured if he said it was a 'jam band' Jakubu wouldn't be interested in checking it out. Well that probably would have been true funny enough - even though Jakubu is totally into just about all classic rock. But he is especially into the stuff Micky Hart has done. I think it all had as much to do with Jon's respect for Jakubu's playing. So anyway, we wound up jamming in the city. Afterwards Jakubu took me aside and said if I wanted to record he'd be into it.

Well he didn't have to say it twice. I said yes on the spot, and probably called Bennett the next day. The session date was set for Jan 13, 2010. So new drummer and new bass player. And of course the mad scientist Pete on keys. Aside from the one rehearsal I scheduled one last minute gig in the city at some dive bar just to get on stage before the recording. I'm guessing when we did the 12 hour recording session on the 13th, it was our 3rd or 4th time together as a 4 piece.

Well this session went very well. So well in fact that I was of the mindset initially of keeping this an entirely separate record on its own. This session became the foundation for much of Everything Changed. This session produced Do You See, TV Tune, Ain't No Fool, Everything Changed, and Chill. It also produced enough additional improvisations to fill nearly an entire CD. As of this writing, I've not even had a chance to go back and revisit that. But it is one of my plans - a mostly instrumental CD collection of the best of our studio improvisations.

Ok, so fast forward to March when Ron Thaler returned from New Zealand. The dates for this session were March 1-6. I had booked a full week of recording with Ron where he was going to be not only the drummer but take on the role of producer. The original plan was to get the songs done right, make record, and incorporate some of the jams and previous recordings. And Ron has had an amazing career as a producer. He's worked with all kinds of big names and his projects have had all sorts of Grammy nominations. I had never worked with a real producer before, much less someone with the major label credits he had. Better yet, being he was in the project I thought it would be quite a unique situation. Of course, I knew this might bring some pitfalls as well, but whatever life is risk right?

As for the choice between Ron and Jakubu on drums, well it wasn't difficult. Both are amazing drummers, and both are so additive that it wasn't any sort of quality trade either way. Ultimately Ron was used to being a drummer/producer, so it seemed like the obvious choice. Did the music take different twists and turns as a result? Of course, they are two distinct personalites. And the music between the two records is different enough. Unfortunately, to hear for yourself the difference between the two records you'll have to wait till I put the next record out... ;-)

So for the next record I went with a lineup of Ron Thaler on drums, Pete on keys, me of course, and Jon Cornell on bass. Jon did such an amazing job with Jakubu I really wanted him on the record even though he hadn't worked with Ron before. I assumed Ron and Jon would lay down a solid foundation, and I was right. The chemistry they found in the music was excellent. If anything the fact that they hadn't worked together before forced both of them out of their comfort zone a little, and made them focus even more. And the results were well worth the efforts.

This session would take on the working title of 'march madness'. It was fun, but it certainly had some madness to it as well. This session is really for another liner note though. Everything we did that week became what is really the next record. But we hadn't finished anything. I now had two half baked records!

We had originally scheduled 4 days for mixing with Rocky Gallo at the Cutting Room in the city. But we hadn't finished the march madness stuff - we never even got to the vocals overdubs! And with Ron yet again leaving the country we didn't have much time. So on the spot we decided to take the highlights from the October session and the January session with Jakubu and turn it into one finished CD that I could at least have. Ron literally grabbed a reference copy of both sessions right there, gave it a listen that night, and decided what we could use to make Everything Changed. Ron was now producing two records for me. And the second record was now going to be the first record.

The mixing and editing with Rocky in the city was a huge education for me. I'd never seen what a real master of digital editing could do. And of course being there to watch Ron and Rocky make all the thousands of decisions that go into mixing and editing, well it was intense. But it was also good that I was there. As much as possible I sat back and let them work. But I helped steer them if I thought they needed it. Fortunately this wasn't often. They both have great instincts and great ears and knew what the songs needed without needing to be told. So mostly the music did the talking at the Cutting Room, the way it should be.

I think what amazed me the most was how far the digital editing had come. The previous records I had done were on digital Adat and the old 2 inch analog tapes. While both are good for high quality capture, the editing isn't even a fraction of what you can do on digital. And the quality of the high resolution digital has really just erased any drawbacks as far as I can tell. It was leaps and bounds beyond where it was 10 years ago. But again I give credit to Rocky and Ron for knowing how to use the technology. Ultimately, the more choices you have, the easier it is to go down the road to ruin. But with their ears as the guide, it was a breeze.

Except for the last day of mixing, which was quite an adventure. We had a hard deadline of mastering for Monday at 10am. Well sometime around 2 am Sunday night when we thought we were finished, we had some sort of crazy equipment freak out. Finally everything was sorted out around 4am and the last song was ready for mastering. So much for sleeping.

Mastering was on March 17. Ron has worked a ton with Scott Hull, literally one of the best mastering engineers on the planet. I think he has 30 Grammy's. No idea on his nominations. And he's one of the most humble and down to earth guys you will meet. When I met him he was more interested in talking about car racing (which he used to do) than anything else.

Well his lab at Masterdisk was impressive. I've never seen speaker towers like those. 6ft tall, 8ft tall? I don't know. They were tall and on the other side of a very large room. And they were loud. And his work console looked more like something out of star trek than any kind of recording studio I've ever seen. It took about 7 hours to do everyhing, fix a few minor things here and there, build the fades, finalize the song order, and then burn off the reference masters.

So total time spent making Everything Changed was 2 days of basics, maybe a total of 2 additional days tops doing overdubs split over 3 or 4 short sessions. 4 days of mixing and editing, and 1 day of mastering. All in all, just 9 days. Normally it takes a minimum of 20 days to do a CD, so this was kind of done in 'record time'.

Live studio record

The overdubs were then limited to backing vocals, one guitar solo on Blue Jeans, some tamborine here and there, some of the bass tracks from October, and then lead vocals for All This Love and Everything Changed.

So overall I think this makes the CD very unusual for a mulitrack recording. While not nearly an actual live record, it really is quite close to being a live studio record. It certainly well represents our live sound. The two jams that best do this are Bike In The Brook and Chill - both are just the 4 piece band with no overdubs at all. Which is cool to me because they also represent the two separate lineups used.

Jamming Vs Pure Improvisaion

And then there is something else that I call pure improvisation. This involves the whole band simultaneously improvising. Everything is fair game: tempo, key, feel, etc. Ron likes to call it compositional improvisation, where the very structure is put together on the fly. I think the guys in Phish call this a level 4 jam. Well whatever you call it, this is kind of my core interest in music these days. Fortunately I'm playing with guys who can bring it and make it work. And much of what is on this CD reflects this approach.

To me, pure improvisation is pure musical communication. Nothing spoken, no plan, no goals - other than letting it happen. And while sometimes what gets recorded isn't useable, more often than not if the players have the ability and the creativity - the results are nothing short of explosive. I think it has to do with keeping the conscious mind from interfering with all the subconscious musical thoughts going on. And good players are able to just let go and play without thinking about it. This allows all those thousands of little adjustments that happen to go on in real time. But this is the scientific way of viewing it.

The spiritual way of viewing what happens is obvious. I certainly know how good it feels to play improvised music. It feels like tapping into a larger collective mind. Or maybe someone else is even getting in the drivers seat. I could probably just keep writing about it for ages, and still not get very close to figuring it out, so I won't bother trying. Better to just listen and allow yourself to meditate and enjoy...

Song by song

Drift
Ok, this was a really fun jam to do. This was from the October session. Originally it was a bit longer, but with the miracle of digital editing we cut it down a bit to give it a punchier feel. This was one of the pure improvisations. It wound up being quite a challenge for Jon to overdub with all the rythmic twists and turns, plus the fact that the structure was improvised as well. It took him several retries, despite is mad skills. Fortunately he figured it out. Few guys could have. And I'm glad he was able to. His bass really gave the song a needed lift.

TV Tune
Jakubu really took a liking to this song. I wrote it ages ago, sometime in the 90s as kind of a silly folk tune. I wanted one song to be unique to the new lineup so I busted this one out out. To this day I don't think I've played it live with Ron on the drums. I'm sure we will. We use this one as a break from the jamming. Nice and easy, just play the tune kind of thing.

Ain't No Fool
Ok, this is maybe the strangest story on the record. This was originally a cover of Purple Haze! But the Hendrix family when they heard it said I changed the song too much so they weren't going to let me use it. Sheesh. Well my mistake for wanting to pay tribute to Hendrix... Well not wanting the music (or my money) to go to waste, I decided to recut the lyrics. Fortunately I had lyrics for a song called Ain't No Fool which was basically the same song. You see I had used one of my originals as the inspiration for radically changing Purple Haze and making it my own. So while it isn't really quite the way I normally do Ain't No Fool, I was able to make it work. So this is the completely transformed and radically altered version of Purple Haze, complete with different lyrics. It was kinda funny featuring so much of Pete on the keys considering it was originally a Hendrix cover, but he tore it up so that's that.

Blue Jeans
Well this is kind of my ode to the jam scene, or ode to rock and roll. It's kind of a collage of my memories of going to see shows in the 80s and 90s, hanging out in the parking lot, etc. I wish I saw the dead more than I did. Of all the songs from October Jon recut bass on, this was clearly the one that grabbed him the most. His performance was simply inspired. Pete's choices on the piano were excellent, and Ron's unorthodox groove underneath really kicked and gave what was really a classic rock inspired idea and gave it a more contemporary feel.

Bike In The Brook
I'm not sure if I had previously mentioned to any of the guys that I wanted to do something that was AMM inspired, Pete maybe. But I certainly mentioned to everyone we could do some more expermiental free form 'ambiant noise' and see where that goes. Well this is where it went. It became about a 20 minute jam all in all. We cut it down to a more manageable 7:51 for the CD. I played it for one friend shortly after and I think it hypnotized him for about 3 minutes. He snapped out of it when I asked him what he thought. No overdubs on this one, but we did do something interesting at mixdown. We piped all the drums back through a channel and added a separate reverb/delay kind of effect to them. We then gradually increased the volume of this to create a whole new level of momentum to the jam. This helped make the shorter timeline work. The bike parts were Ron. He found a junk kids bike in the city somewhere and added the horn and bell to his bag of percussion tricks. My kids crack up when they hear the horn. Sounds like a duck to them. The title comes from when I was 6 years old. My bike was stolen, and we found it about a half mile from my house in a small brook. Well from then on the bike felt a bit contaminated to me (as I'm sure the brook really was). If you go to my facebook page, you can Watch the Bike In The Brook Video made of us playing while we were recording this in the studio. The video version is much longer though, about 13 minutes.

All This Love
Well this was a jam, but not really an improvisation. The chord structure was a loose idea I'd had for about 6 months. Just a few jazzy chords and a chill vibe. This jam was originally done in October. Musically, the jam was very wide open. After we did it I knew it would need some overdubs to complete it. But the more I listened I thought lyrics might work and help fill in the gaps. Lyrically I mainly got the idea sometime in November 2009 but some of the lyrics I already had. This became what I call a retrofit, where I wrote the lyrics after the band jammed the musical idea out. Jon later redid the bass, quite well I think really taking the song up a notch. It was Ron's idea to have Shannon come in and put some backing vocals on the song. And a great idea it was.

Everything Changed
This is the second retrofit on the CD. Originally also a pure improvisation. I got the lyrical ideas much later on for this one. I really wanted the guitar solo on the record, but the buildup to the solo just didn't have enough meat to it. Funny enough, Ron wanted to cut the guitar solo out all together just use the earlier bit. Damned drummer... It was a fun jam, and actually went on quite a bit longer than then ending we used at mix. The total jam was maybe 15-20 minutes. I wound up recording the vocals at the Cutting Room in NYC. I sprang this one on Ron and Rockey, but the lyrics really took the tune where it needed to be. But being a retrofit, I wound up actually writing some of the lines right there on the spot to make the arrangement work. 'and I knew that I had to know' was one of them. I remember Ron had first suggested a line. I wish I could remember it now. It was bad enough to not only make me laugh out loud but it forced me to scramble and come up with something better quickly.

This tune is one of the more directly Dead inspired songs on the CD, especially from the first album of theirs I had as a kid. To his credit, Rocky made the association right away flexing some of his 'dead cred'. Much respect sir. ;-)

Chill
This is part of a much longer pure improvisation, which to me came out great. I left the production decision with Ron to cut it down to such a short piece, which is really just the intro to the larger jam. It is really the warmup jam (first jam) from the January Jakubu session. Warmup jams to me usually take on a certain level of significance. They can set the tone for a session, and can also be a preview of what kind of inspiration will happen that day. I do have a good copy of a reference mix for the longer session. I'll likely do some basic eq work on it and make it available at some point. But I'm certainly going to have the longer session mixed properly and added to a future release.

As it is, Chill to me really highlights the kind of amazing vibes that Jakubu brings to the table. It has a nice spooky athmosphere that shows how mellow we can get when jamming. As it is cut though, it is missing all the later buildups. The benefit is that it stays in a very cool kind of mood. Ultimately though I do want the longer version out there. I think the rest of the jam was saying something worth hearing.

Into The Realm
This is really a continuation of Bike In The Brook. It was all part of the same 20 minute or so improvisation. The jam took a radical enough departure though that it really seemed to make more sense to break it into two parts. By breaking the jam up, we could then use this to close out the CD on a high energy kick, and maybe also leave a few thoughts about new realms of future possibility.

You're the One
Well this is the song that didn't make the final cut, but nearly did. Kind of a long story. But certain audio standards needed to be maintained. Really the production issues that plagued this song were my fault, and were made at the time when I was self producing. We mixed it and did everything we could to counter the problems it had with no luck. May I can remix it and do something with it. It might take radical surgery though. MOre than likely we will have to give this one a redo for a later record. It is a shame it didn't make it to the CD. Ron did a great job on the drums, and I think it was the best of the retrofit ideas. Musically it had a lot in common with the title track Everything Changed. So I don't think this one is dead and buried yet...

Thanks

Airplay

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