Friday, October 26, 2012

Weekend/Week of Epic Proportions

I lead a blessed life. I truly do. I live in a place with the most perfect climate. It's been just Fall-y enough lately to make me comfortably feel like it's Autumn, and I have been riding a wave of non-stop awesomeness. Let's just talk about the last 6 days, shall we?

Saturday I woke up early-ish, and for the first time in quite a while Alex didn't have a meeting on Saturday morning, so we had a lovely brunch at The Village Idiot. Then we went to the Beverly Center to pick up his new suit from J. Lindberg (which he looks extremely handsome in). He went off to a screening of his film at the Arclight (!!!), while I did a couple errands. We met up with some of his friends at The Cat and the Fiddle for drinks. It was the bar's 30th anniversary, so there was free champagne! We had a tasty dinner at Loteria Grill. I like that place, but $9 for chips and guacamole seems a little steep to me.

Sunday morning I packed mimosa supplies and chocolate chip cookies, and met up with my Picture and the Frame bandmates at our friends Justin and Clarissa's place to take some photos in their pool for our album cover. The water was freezing, but I was having a great time until the waterproof camera proved not to actually be waterproof. We'll be trying again in a couple of weeks, much to Rickett and Mark's chagrin, I'm afraid. We were so close, but we didn't quite get there before the camera ceased to function. But the shots we got convinced me that it was, in fact, a great idea, and worth pursuing.



After we dried off and warmed up, we had a nice productive band practice. Alex had an award event Sunday night for the Hollywood Film Festival, but it wasn't until 9, so we got takeout pho and watched "Sherlock" (ob-SESSED), until it was time to go. The event ended up being pretty boring, and I was way overdressed, but I got a free drink out of it at least. Seriously though, nothing less exciting than watching other people network.

Monday, The Picture and the Frame were back in the studio. We laid down drum tracks for 3 songs, and got a little bit of guitar tracking done as well. I took off a little early to go to a fah-bulous gah-la. At the last minute I managed to get a ticket to tag along with Alex and his producing partner, Jonathan, to The Hollywood Film Awards, where we saw a large number of incredibly famous people receive awards for films that in many cases have not actually been released yet...all from the comfort of our table in the far back corner. It was fun though. I had my incredibly dusty Scion valet parked at the Beverly Hilton, then sashayed around the cocktail reception drinking free champagne and martinis in my prom dress from my sophomore year of high school. If I may boast for a moment, I looked like a couple hundred bucks. The program was long, and we consumed a measure more wine than was strictly respectable, but I think we comported ourselves admirably.
And that's just the ladies' room

Tuesday we were back in the studio for more guitar, vocals, and a little bit of organ. I found out on Facebook that morning that Local Natives were playing a "secret" show at The Satellite, and fortunately for me, the man producing our record also produced theirs...and produced me a spot on the list for what turned out to be an utterly SICK show. I mean sick in a positive way, for those of you that are related to me and over 60 (85% of my readership). I saw those guys play there three years ago when they were doing the Monday night residency, then again at Disney Hall with the LA Phil backing them up, so it was really cool to kind of see it come full circle.

The view from the back

Wednesday brought more studio time. I did some more vocals, we tracked Rickett's back-ups. Raymond's friend came by to do some shaker magic. I'm very pleased to say that Mr Raymond Richards himself broke out the pedal steel. After the session, I went to hang out with my other band, Sunken Ships. It was Pablo's birthday, so I stopped by his party for a drink or two, but then these guys showed up with instruments I'd never seen or heard of before, and I simply couldn't leave until I'd seen them in action. Everybody there was taking video. Eventually I'm going to track it down on Facebook. 

This is a marimbol. It's a bass thumb piano. I want one. Bad.

A jarana and a requinto jarocho. Not sure which is which.

So that drink or two turned into I'm-not-sure-how-many, but I still rallied Thursday morning to go - you guessed it - back to the studio! Maybe by now you can tell how incredibly excited I am about recording. We were so efficient Monday through Wednesday, that we just had my vocals to do on about 1 1/2 songs. It was nice to have time to really fine tune everything. I'm very very excited! Did I mention I was excited?

All that excitement really crescendoed when I woke up at 5 a.m. for work and realized Alex had given me his cold. You can't win 'em all, I guess. But on the bright side, Raymond sent me the mix of "Crime" today, and I like it!


1 comment:

  1. FUN...and fyi, I do know what "sick" means although it isn't my favorite way to say great. xoxoxoxokp

    ReplyDelete