Bob Angello, Jesse Poe and Howard Duck I now have two finished songs that I recorded a couple of days ago at Angello Sound Studio in Hermitage, a few miles outside Nashville in lake country, and that Bob Angello mixed and mastered yesterday. I’ve had a number of demos recorded there already, but always from a distance, and although Bob and I have spoken many times on the phone, we’d never met in person. So it was a delight to meet him and to have much more direct contact with everyone involved in the recording of the songs – and to put down my vocal right there in the studio. I’m delighted with the results, and this has been a highlight of my US trip.
Bob himself is a brilliant pedal steel guitar player and all-round guitarist, having toured the world with many of the country greats, including Pam Tillis and Suzy Bogguss, so to have him play on, as well as produce, my songs was a thrill for me. On keyboards this time was Howard Duck, who didn’t flinch at the fact that one of the songs was in C sharp major (easy enough on the guitar with a cheatin’ capo, but a swine on keyboards!), and in fact generously said he relished the opportunity to flex those little-used C-sharp muscles! That particular song started out as ‘That Kiss’, but has ended up with the title ‘It’s Wrong’ – thanks to Howard assuming that must be the title, and me then realising that yes, of course that had to be the right name for the song, as that phrase crops up far more often than anything else in it.
The other song is one of my new Christmas songs (I seem to be going through a festive phase at the moment – just in time for the season itself!), and whereas I’d imagined cheesy sleigh bells and the like, what we’ve ended up with is much more imaginative and evocative, and I love it!
The man who introduced me to Bob a few years ago, Jesse Poe, was there too, on the desk, and it was really lovely to see him again and benefit from his expertise and judgement.
I’ve been invited to a Halloween party this evening. Not a great one for dressing up (unless it’s on stage!), I mooched around Target yesterday after leaving the studio and ended up with a witch’s hat and some fake cobweb stuff, so I need to get creative with that in a few hours’ time. It being Nashville, there’ll be a bevy of songwriters there and I think I’m playing a few songs as soon as we get there. Never played in a cobwebby witch’s hat before. It’s an image, I suppose…
I thought I’d take a bottle of wine along to the party, and naively went along to Kroger’s supermarket to buy a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I say naively because I hadn’t even thought about the fact that alcohol is by no means as freely available over here as it is in the binge-drinking UK, and it turned out that all that was available at Kroger’s was beer. So I had to find a ‘liquor store’ to source my Pinot, its barred windows making me feel slightly illicit as I did so. While I was there I also bought a teeny bottle of gin, finding Seagram’s to be suspiciously cheap and probably pretty rough, but worth a shot.
Discovering that the Dolly Parton store that used to be a fixture in downtown Nashville is no longer in existence was a bit of a blow, and Tammy Kitten, my showbiz partner back in ol’ Blighty, is still recovering from the shock. I’m now having to look elsewhere for Dolly memorabilia for Kitten Kaboodle’s act. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cheap(ish) souvenir tat shops in Nashville, just not many selling cheapish Dolly-related tat. We may have to create our own…
Bob himself is a brilliant pedal steel guitar player and all-round guitarist, having toured the world with many of the country greats, including Pam Tillis and Suzy Bogguss, so to have him play on, as well as produce, my songs was a thrill for me. On keyboards this time was Howard Duck, who didn’t flinch at the fact that one of the songs was in C sharp major (easy enough on the guitar with a cheatin’ capo, but a swine on keyboards!), and in fact generously said he relished the opportunity to flex those little-used C-sharp muscles! That particular song started out as ‘That Kiss’, but has ended up with the title ‘It’s Wrong’ – thanks to Howard assuming that must be the title, and me then realising that yes, of course that had to be the right name for the song, as that phrase crops up far more often than anything else in it.
The other song is one of my new Christmas songs (I seem to be going through a festive phase at the moment – just in time for the season itself!), and whereas I’d imagined cheesy sleigh bells and the like, what we’ve ended up with is much more imaginative and evocative, and I love it!
The man who introduced me to Bob a few years ago, Jesse Poe, was there too, on the desk, and it was really lovely to see him again and benefit from his expertise and judgement.
I’ve been invited to a Halloween party this evening. Not a great one for dressing up (unless it’s on stage!), I mooched around Target yesterday after leaving the studio and ended up with a witch’s hat and some fake cobweb stuff, so I need to get creative with that in a few hours’ time. It being Nashville, there’ll be a bevy of songwriters there and I think I’m playing a few songs as soon as we get there. Never played in a cobwebby witch’s hat before. It’s an image, I suppose…
I thought I’d take a bottle of wine along to the party, and naively went along to Kroger’s supermarket to buy a bottle of Pinot Grigio. I say naively because I hadn’t even thought about the fact that alcohol is by no means as freely available over here as it is in the binge-drinking UK, and it turned out that all that was available at Kroger’s was beer. So I had to find a ‘liquor store’ to source my Pinot, its barred windows making me feel slightly illicit as I did so. While I was there I also bought a teeny bottle of gin, finding Seagram’s to be suspiciously cheap and probably pretty rough, but worth a shot.
Discovering that the Dolly Parton store that used to be a fixture in downtown Nashville is no longer in existence was a bit of a blow, and Tammy Kitten, my showbiz partner back in ol’ Blighty, is still recovering from the shock. I’m now having to look elsewhere for Dolly memorabilia for Kitten Kaboodle’s act. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of cheap(ish) souvenir tat shops in Nashville, just not many selling cheapish Dolly-related tat. We may have to create our own…
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