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.

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L.A. was great. I think we cut the song that will be the first single for the record and another two that are also really strong. The magic happened at the House of Blues Studios which is located at a mansion in L.A. It used to be Tito Jackson’s house and studio. Luckily there wasn’t that much of the creepy Jackson family vibe left over from that time.

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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.

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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.

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I now have a MP3 player/jukebox on my sidebar. It has some songs from Blu, David Garza, Craig Marshall and Tenlons Fort. I played on all these songs. I hope you like them and that the player works. You might not have the right flash player plug-in if it doesn’t, and you have to click it to start it up once the playlist loads. Feel free to open up another window for surfing and let this one play on while you do your thing on the internet.

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I just added a discography page over there on the side bar. I will link up some samples of each one in the near future, but there are already some samples on most of the artists’ websites you can listen to for now. I’ve lost track of a couple of the records I played on that I didn’t list. I was hired for the day and never kept up with the producer or artist. I’ll have to do some research to figure it all out.

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It looks like we are going to finish up Matt’s record in L.A. the first half of February. Maybe have it mixed in March and probably have it out this summer or possibly LATE spring. But don’t quote me on that. Matt says this new batch of songs are the best so far and that’s great considering that we have already recorded some great ones. I can’t wait to make my mark on them.

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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.
 

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I am so bad about keeping up with posts. The shorter version of the last few months.

We kicked ass on the fall tour. Matt sold out tons of huge venues like the House of Blues in Chicago, Irving Plaza in NYC, three nights at the Paradise Rock club in Boston, two nights at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and the 9:30 club in D.C. Every show across the country was full or sold out, and we have never sounded better.

I played almost every night of the tour with Kate Earl, who was one of the openers, Matt Wertz was the other opener. Oh my god, she is so good. I had a great time doing our duo show, bass violin and piano/vocal. I bowed most of the set and I had total musical freedom. We did some shows as a trio with Jason McKenzie on drums. The guys from Incubus played on Kate’s record. I’m really impressed how well those guys can play. I learned a lot about myself playing with Kate and I hope to do more shows with her in the future.

I just played some shows with Patrice Pike. I played with her for a year or so before I joined up with Matt. We were also in a band called Sister 7 together. I left that band in the early 90′s and then went on to play with David Garza. I was just subbing for my friend Brad Houser, the guy who took my place once I left. He was out doing some shows with his side project Critters Buggin.

I’ve got several recording projects in January. Houston Marchaman, Craig Marshall and more recording with Matt Nathanson.

Plus I am going to remix or produce Patrice’s live show. Not sure what you call it, but I am helping her redo her solo show by programming new beats and general racket for her to play with when she is by herself on stage. She also wants to utilize it with her band shows. I’m a huge Bjork fan and her Matmos era live show will be an influence on how I put this together.

I am redoing my website. I just can’t decide if I want to go back to the old blog I had or do a heavy duty static content site. Either way I plan on putting up lot’s of music.

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