Showing posts with label raccoons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raccoons. Show all posts

Friday, November 7, 2008

Not Just A Rock Band: A Barack Band

The band took Tuesday night off to learn that at long, long last, we were not going to wake up the morning after a presidential election and wish we could just die. No, I am ecstatic that we have entered a new era, one filled with rainbows and puppies and other overwhelmingly happy phenomena. To illustrate the sweetness of victory, I baked blue Democratic cupcakes and frosted them with blue Democratic frosting. They were darned tasty.

You kind of assume that nothing will ever be lackluster again in the rainbow-and-puppydog era, but I have to confess that my faith in my insane band project has been foundering. Was it
 ludicrous to take this on? What have I gotten us all into?

The other members of the band cannot be held responsible for my doubts. A lot of it probably has nothing to do with the album at all. Everyone's life is complicated, right? I got back from a trip to India ten days ago and haven't fully unpacked. The election gave me piles of things to do at work. I have raccoons in my attic. I don't seem to own enough pairs of pants, and I don't seem to have time to shop for pants. I am preoccupied with family issues. RCN is switching to digital programming and I won't get any channels anymore. A guy I had a stupid crush on a decade ago appeared on MSNBC wearing a wedding ring. My Smartrip card spontaneously ceased working. I worry about money. 

So, let's not blame the album for my fretting about the album; there's got to be some transference going on here. But still, there are things that really ARE about the album that are gnawing at me. We're a week in, and we've got almost no tracks laid down to show for it. We spent an evening on Lucky's song, and I don't even know what it sounds like yet. Our drummer has been jetting around from continent to continent and won't be available for a rehearsal until the 15th. I haven't gotten past reading Chapter One in my illuminating book on GarageBand software. The thought of Chinese food, a rehearsal staple, is already starting to make me feel nauseous.

Really, I am happy that Bill has found fame and a successful career and a wife. Oh yeah. He deserves it. 

Cerin, who is my rock in addition to being a rockstar, reminded me that there are some real things to feel good about with respect to KEIT's work so far this month. Annimal's song, for example, is a seriously fun little number. People kept telling me "All Mine" would be hard, but Cerin has it down cold, and Mic called his part "a piece of piss," which translates from Irish to "it's easy" in English. We now know what MIDI is and we're not afraid to use it. We borrowed an amp from loyal KEIT groupie Chris Oropeza and it makes the guitar sound like an actual rock band guitar, which is so fantastic. It's too early to freak out and give up, Cerin said.

And probably I had these sort of doubts last year, early in the month. Probably I could just scroll down in this blog and be reassured that any doubts are normal and will fade away.

Whatever about Bill and his wife and his national television audience. I mean, I have a band, you know. Does Bill have a band? Oh please. I think not.

Tomorrow we'll be playing "Washington DC" with a huge cast, by our standards. There's going to be like five of us. I think we can do a live recording and the only thing we'll be missing is the bass, which we can layer on later.

Anyway, just because he's married doesn't mean he's happily married, not that I wish him anything but perfect wedded bliss, of course.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Knee-Deep in the Rock-n-Roll Lifestyle

Last night I partied like a rock star with an actual rock star, namely Bono. Okay, well it wasn’t just me and Bono. Queen Noor, George Soros, and Ashley Judd were there too. Okay, and several hundred other people. Anyway he was very excited to hear from me that Know Eye Inn Teem will be covering "Sunday Bloody Sunday" on our album, and wholly endorsed our plan to set it to a mambo beat, wondering aloud in his charming Irish accent why he hadn't thought of it himself.


I was drinking, so the details of that story may not be entirely accurate.



Bono and me

I got to bed around 3AM, and then woke up about 7:30 this morning to have time to run to my office to retrieve my new (used) iBook before my sound technician would arrive at the KEIT studio at 10AM. By "sound technician," I actually mean "raccoon exterminator" (as many of you know, I have raccoons). Unfortunately, he never showed up, which was particularly aggravating because before I became a rock star (i.e. yesterday), I was used to getting a lot more sleep.


I did squeeze in a 30-minute nap before the very first KEIT rehearsal, then powered up the iBook for the very first time right before Peter and Cerin arrived. I will confess to you that at that moment -- hung over, sleep-deprived, staring uncomprehendingly at GarageBand software I had never seen before on an unfamiliar computer -- I had some serious self-doubts.


But we ordered a pizza and dove in. We played "You Know I'm No Good," and you know, we were no good, at least at first. But we got the hang of it, and Peter figured out how to layer the instruments and vocals on the software. So after we played it through a few times together, we finished the rehearsal by each listening with headphones to Amy Winehouse singing the song, and recording it as we played or sang along individually. Now I just have to figure out how to put the layers together.

Today's rehearsal was miraculous, in short. I am very proud of the Teem.