Tenlons Fort:: the Golden Handshake is now on iTunes. It’s my first crack at engineering and I’m pretty happy with it even though I had no idea what I was doing and my means were so low tech. I also played all the bass and the “string bass trio.” Buy it, rate it and review it.

This link will open it up in the iTunes music store if you have iTunes.

The Golden Handshake

I just finished recording Lil’ Alice Spencer and Her Monkey Butlers. It was my first purely engineering project. I loved it, I only had to worry about the sound and didn’t have to juggle that with bass playing duties.

Here is a description of the band from Alice’s website:

Li’l Alice & Her Monkey Butlers perform jazz and blues from the 1920′s & 1930′s, as well as original material. The band is led by singer Alice Spencer with Mark Rubin on tuba (Bad Livers, Klezmer Brass All-Stars), ‘Pops’ Bayless on ukulele and banjo (Shorty Long, Asylum Street Spankers), Joe Cordi on piano (Giant City Sextet), and Ben Saffer on clarinet (Rubinchik’s Yiddish Ensemble, Victrola).

I’ll post clips once we have it mastered.

I played bass on my third country record this past weekend. The first two records were some demos with Jack Ingram and Elizabeth Wills’ record Road trip. This time it was with Houston Marchman. Houston is really more Texas singer-songwriter/Americana than hee haw, but it is about as country as I get. Jack Ingram used to introduce me as John “T” Country. I think he was making fun of this city boy. Anyway, I can’t wait to hear how the session turned out. the whole thing happened so damn fast. Houston would strum his way through a song and then we would cut it usually in one take. I know we did six songs that day, but there are two that I don’t remember doing because we did them so fast. Totally different than the way we are doing the Matt Nathanson record. With Matt, we are looking for that one magical take off each song and that can take a little while to get everything dialed in. I personally like the one take approach unless there is a train wreck and it was nice to see it in action last weekend.

My buddies Kyle Schneider played drums and Gabe Rhodes played guitar, so that had a huge impact on the magic. MVP of the session has to go to Milo Deering. Milo played with Lee Ann Rimes for a couple of years. I knew he was a monster Guitar/Pedal Steel player from the Elizabeth Wills Road Trip session, but he broke out the fiddle for some songs with Houston. He plays so beautifully and has such a great sound. Better than any fiddle player I’ve heard in a while. I’ll be sure to post some clips when I get a copy.

The Portland Mercury asked some influencial local musicians to list their favorite records of 2005.

Here is what Alex James from Dolorean wrote:

1. Tenlons Fort – The Golden Handshake
2. Jose Gonzalez – Veneer
3. Smog – A River Ain’t Too Much to Love
4. Bill Fay – Time of the Last Persecution
5. Dinosaur Jr. – You’re Living All Over Me
6. Holy Sons – My Only Warm Coals
7. Antony and the Johnsons – I Am a Bird Now
8. Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase
9. Neil Young – Prairie Wind
10. Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney – Superwolf

Pretty cool…..TFort is at the top. I’m pretty psyched since it was my first time engineering and we had to do some hard core guerilla recording. But Jack Gibson is the shit and so are his songs, so he made it super easy.

I’m part of a project/band/person named Tenlons Fort. It was my first crack at engineering and co-producing. I have a couple of tracks on my myspace page, but you can also hear some on the Tenlons Fort MySpace page.