Fool On The Hill

In the spring, I was questioned for two hours at the border crossing. They seemed to have a hard time believing I was going to go home again in six weeks like I said. This was my first crossing with the Nexus 'trusted traveler' card, so it was a huge and stressful surprise to me. In hindsight, I did have a ton of needless crap in the car, so maybe it did look like I was pulling up stakes. Anyway after finally calling my boss to corroborate my story, they let me in. Phew!

The two other big events on that trip were pro demo recording sessions at Parlor for This Old House and at Beaird for Move Mountains.

Matt Legge engineered and mixed This Old House. We hung around for a while, 'chewing the fat' as they say back home or 'shooting the breeze' they'd say elsewhere. He mentioned Sam Hawksley, a writer-producer friend of his who he thought I should meet. Only trouble was I was heading back to Toronto a couple days later.

We kept in touch and I timed my next trip to coincide with some album sessions that Matt and Sam had scheduled in July.

So I rolled into town again July 7, planning to stay for just two weeks. I decided to give up the 6-8-week visits partly because they seemed to cause undue suspicion at the border and also because it was hard being away from loved ones back home.

Matt invited me to hang out and listen to the sessions they were doing at Fool On The Hill for Nina Ferro's upcoming record. I listened while the five-piece band recorded two songs with Nina singing in an iso booth. Great songs, great band and a great voice!

Back up a few hours: it was Friday morning and I'd been in town five days. Up to that point, I didn't  have any plans to record. But following an NSAI mentoring meeting with Candi Carpenter, I decided I wanted to record a couple of simple acoustic versions of two of my not-so-country songs.

The mentoring sessions are an hour and mine with Candi was supposed to be Thursday morning. But the NSAI schedule got mixed up and she never knew about it. So she came in Friday just to hang out with me because she'd be on tour up north the following week and we wouldn't have another chance. We ended up spending around two hours talking and playing music.

Candi got excited about Move Mountains and This Old House. But when I told her I didn't have much similar country stuff, she said it'd be tricky approaching publishers with only two solid country demos. Although I might be hoping for a single-song deal to get things started, that wasn't necessarily how they'd be thinking.  Typically, they want to know that a new writer has a lot of stuff in the ballpark and the potential to regularly churn out a lot more stuff, including hits. Anyhoodles, I said I had some other stuff that I wondered about.

So I pulled out my guitar and played What About The Grey and Any Other Lover. In both cases, Candi was humming along harmonies pretty quickly and her positive feedback was incredible. It's funny how I'd discounted these songs because they didn't feel 'country' to me, even though I loved them. What About The Grey was about six years old, with an occasional edit in the meantime; and Any Other Lover was about two weeks old. Thinking of it now, it's interesting that they both started with guitar parts before lyrics (unusual bits for me that came from just fooling around, not intending to write anything) and out of emotion vs an objective hook-driven process.

Following that great meeting, I went to the studio to meet Matt and told him I was thinking of recording a couple of songs. He said "you need a guitarist?" and pointed through the studio window at Sam. I said hells yeah. So we lined up a session for the following Friday.

Sam would play acoustic and I'd sing. Nothing fancy. Candi had said she'd sing harmonies for me if she got back in town in time for the session, but it turned out she wouldn't. So she recommended Kenzie Wetz, a friend of hers and a great singer and musician.

I had another NSAI mentoring session the following Monday with Roger Alan Nichols and started right in with these and a couple other 'non-country' songs for his feedback. He loved them too! Roger really dug into the nitty gritty of the lyrics more so than Candi had. He had some great points about What About The Grey. A couple lines didn't really stick to the rhyme scheme. I'd hemmed and hawed over them through the years but liked the way they sounded, even though they clearly didn't rhyme. In hindsight, if I'm being honest, it was pure laziness that I didn't change them. Roger said "Publishers hear so many songs that they're just waiting for a reason to say no. When the brain's expecting a rhyme before the first chorus and you don't deliver, that's the reason to say no." So I sat down to fix them before the recording session and it didn't really take very long once I set my mind to it.

That Wednesday I met Matt at a pub to watch a soccer match and Sam came 'round too. We never got to talk much at Nina's session because they were working their butts off. So it was good to just hang out and get acquainted.

Matt setting up the session and Sam making loops

Come Friday, I showed up at the studio around 1:00 for a 1:15 start. Sam was already crouched over his laptop, programming a drum loop to one of the soundcloud links I'd sent.

We started with What About The Grey. Sam was on acoustic in one iso booth and I was singing in another. There was a window between us and we both had big windows into the control room where Matt was at the helm. We ran through it a couple times till we found a comfy tempo.

Sam had a solid guitar part after two takes and then added another part with a different guitar. I sang the whole way through each pass and we took the best bits from each to make a whole lead vocal part. Most of the bits came from one take, which I find is usually the case.

Sam playing 2nd acoustic for What About The Grey

Then we ran though the same process with Every Other Lover. The way Sam approached the first song had a bit of a different vibe than my original, but his take on this one was even more different – almost a reggae undertone, which was pretty cool. Sam is a fabulous guitar player – totally uninhibited by genre or style. He was playing electric R&B and soul last Friday and now he was playing reggae-infused acoustic folk rock.

Kenzi showed up on time for her vocal session and hung around patiently while we finished up the last acoustic track.

While Matt set up the booth for her, we ran the songs a couple times in the control room. She jumped right in and sounded so incredibly natural that I couldn't contain the smiles. What a beautiful voice, and we really mixed well.

I didn't have much in the way of concrete ideas for the harmonies, so I just figured we'd let her do whatever came natural and see what else popped up along the way.

Matt was great for this part of the process – not only engineering and keeping track of various parts of multiple takes, but helping me articulate my ideas and throwing in some of the best ones himself. We bounced a bunch of ideas around and Kenzie was great about trying anything and letting us know what she thought. All in all, easy as pie.

After that, Sam started setting up his electric gear. This was an awesome addition because I'd come into the studio only expecting acoustic tracks – and they were already sounding great. Matt said, "That's just how he rolls, man." They both seemed really into the tunes, which was the cherry on top from my perspective. They work on so much great music in the run of a day – it's a cool feeling to know they're digging your stuff.

While they were setting up, I took lunch orders and headed out to Firehouse Subs just out around the corner. By the time I got back, they were starting electric guitar parts on the second song. I didn't even hear the electric tracks for the first song until the end and we were eating sandwiches! But they were great and I had nothing to change.

Then I helped Sam load his car, Matt gave me rough mixes and we were all on our way again. What a great finale to the visit, making music with some wonderfully creative people.

For all the positive vibes this trip, thank you Candi, Roger, Matt, Sam and Kenzie.