FINÉ
me – backing vox, guiro
HITCHCOCK BLONDE
Rob – guitar
JEFF LYNNE
me – backing vox, mellotron
Rob – violin samples
KING SHAM
me – backing vox
Well, you can see we got some work done. We’ve had a list for a while, I posted it here a few months ago, of what we had left to do on each song. Today we just started going down the list.
FINÉ didn’t need much. The ending has always seemed a little abrupt to me so we added some echoey backing vocals to it, and me playing the guiro (that’s that wooden fish looking thing that you play with a stick. I looked it up). Rob did a guitar solo for HITCHCOCK BLONDE on the Telecaster.
I added some backing vocals to KING SHAM, and we stacked some more on a couple of parts. I was a little distracted during it, because for some reason, I thought about Joseph Cotten’s character in The Third Man and couldn’t, for the life of me, remember his name. It drove me nuts the whole time I was doing the vocals.
The one disappointment was JEFF LYNNE. When I got asked to play IPO a few days ago, I wanted to put something on the CD they put out every year, and so I sent him some unfinished songs, and he requested this one, which didn’t come as a total shock (song about ELO on a CD for power pop freaks?). With Rob leaving town on April 8th the main priority is to get that song mixed and mastered, because the deadline is May 10 and Rob won’t be back before then. One of the remaining things was to add strings, but it’s become apparent that my ideas for the strings are simply overly ambitious given my budget and the time I have to complete them. So, Rob used some samples and doctored them so that they work well enough. I did manage to add the trademark backing vocal chorus to the song (we used a combination of me singing, and me playing the mellotron vocal sound), so at least that’s there. It’s hard to listen to the song and know whether or not it works, simply because I’m hearing it through this ELO haze that it doesn’t match up to.
I am happy that I’m playing more instruments, even if it is in a very limited fashion.
So, the plan is… Rob leaves town on April 8, so we’re shooting to have every bit of recording done before then. We’ll also mix “Jeff Lynne.” He’s back in town on May 24, when we’ll start mixing the rest of the CD. So, if I have it done by June 1, that’ll give me a month to get it pressed (with another 3 weeks buffer for problems) and ready in time for IPO.
I hope.
I did find out that Josh Joplin is recording his new CD at Adam (Fountains of Wayne, wrote the music for That Thing You Do!) Schlesinger’s studio. Rob says he’s a nice guy. I should get him to give him my CD.
Ah, one more thing. I have mentioned many times, I know, how long this CD has taken to record. I started work on it in October of 2000. But that length of time was deceptive, I know, because it’s been a bit here and a bit there. I totaled up my hours today and we’ve only actually spent 111 hours on it (including today, which was 6 hours, the longest we’ve spent in one day the whole time). Three weeks worth of five hour days. That’s all. Stretched out over a year and a half.
Next CD I’m doing in one shot. Oh, and Joseph Cotten’s name was “Holly Martins.” I thought of it after I finished the vocals.