🎲 🏔 📝 inside the studio
yeah... we recorded the album
Howdy partners,
It’s Thursday and I have a bumper issue of ‘a constellation,’ with a cool update on the album. I’m drinking a cup of tea, I’ve got the windows open, the sun is shining and the laundry is drying on the rack. Life is good.
I have been doing a lot of emailing and brainstorming this past week to get some exciting things underway for the rest of the year, in terms of more gigs and events. Keep your eyes peeled for that.
But for now, let’s get stuck in to the juicy details… of recording my debut album!
So I can finally share some fun news with you all — I was in the studio last month! I took four days at Laurel Sound in Hertfordshire and recorded all the drums, guitars, lead vocals and piano for the album. Working with me the first two days was my drummer Jack Painting, and the last two days I had producer/musician James Li (Kowloon Cowboy). Ed and Ollie Taylor, aka The Taylor Twins, engineered the sessions, and also played a fair bit on the record, too.
The idyllic Laurel Sounds is situated in the back garden of a house in a small village. It was so nice to be able to take morning dog walks and have dinner in a family kitchen. Being in a residential setting also means that you get into ‘the zone’ pretty quickly, and our daily routine went a bit like this:
8am: wake up, shower and go down to the kitchen for some breakfast and a chat with the guys
9:30am: get into the studio and do a little warm up and review what we need to do for the day, we consult THE CHART.
10am: studio day officially starts! normally do something like guitar or drums first. a teapot is continuously being topped up
1pm: lunch break at the house. make a bagel or reheat some leftovers. have a chat about how the work is going and also talk about other random things
2pm: make another pot of tea and get back into the studio! do stuff like vocals or more guitars
7pm: someone might head off to start cooking dinner. we’re normally tracking the bass or piano as it gets later in the day
8:30pm: dinner! nearly always starving by this point and food feels well-deserved
9pm: bed! i am exhausted and go straight to sleep.
For the most part everything went really smoothly! Here is THE CHART so we could cross everything off as we did it:
This also meant that we knew when we had a bit of extra time to experiment with some more instrumentation on the songs, like big booming toms for a dramatic finale, or twinkly piano bits.
I really enjoyed being the person who played all the piano on this record. When it comes to the piano, my imagination is more flexible than my hands, so I don’t always translate what I’m thinking that well on to the keys, but I wrote some pretty good parts on the fly and the seven million tries it took to play a four-bar phrase correctly were worth it.
I also played my own cowbell! However I now have a deep appreciation for the amount of skill and muscle memory that goes in to hitting things in time.
The hardest part of the experience was when I hit a bit of a wall with one of the songs, ‘Coulee City Rodeo Queen.’ It was a song that I knew I wanted to be one of the big moments on the album, but really needed to rely on other people to help me create that vision. Jack had laid down a great drum part that we’d written together, and I knew I wanted some big electric guitar moments on it, but I felt at a loss of how to create those moments.
I reached a point about a third of the way in to recording the song where I just felt so… ugh! You know when you’re a kid and you do a drawing of something beautiful you can picture in your mind so clearly but when your pen hits the page it looks like this:
This is how I felt after laying down the basics for the song. It just felt so… flat. And wrong. And everything we were trying to add just sounded like this:
I’m not gonna lie when I say I felt like crying (hah!) and so I realised the best thing was to just step out of the room.
Sometimes, you gotta step out the room. Especially when you’re emotionally invested in the outcome.
I vented my frustration with the song to Phil, Ed & Ollie’s dad who was having a cup of tea in the kitchen. He suggested that we try and stop thinking about the outcome, but instead just noodle over the song, play guitar, have a bit of fun and if anything sounds good, record it in the moment.
Going back into the studio, this approach really helped. All of a sudden the session felt a lot looser. We threw around guitar and piano licks and if someone played something good, we’d say, “ooh, record that,” and then play it straight on to the song.
By the end of the day we’d transformed the song — or more importantly, we’d transformed my feelings towards it. The problem hadn’t been a bad song, just my frustration with the messy in-between bit that always comes when you’re making something new.
I’d like to thank James, Jack, Ed and Ollie for their help over that week of recording — there’s now a bit more work for myself to get done before I can hand them over for mixing, but it’s all happening! Stay tuned for more updates on the album.
things i liked
✶ I keep thinking about the art of this Supergirl comic I read the other day. It’s just incredible, and the comic itself is up for a Hugo award! As someone who is only just getting into superheroes and likes superhero comics which aren’t overly superhero-ey, this one is brilliant.
✶ Music-wise, I am enjoying this disco song:
✶ This dog:
✶ I went to see Regina Spektor at the Southbank Centre the other day and it was so! FREAKIN! lovely! She genuinely is such a talent and her songs are woven deep into the tapestry of my teenage years, and the music I write today. Here’s one of my favourites that she played at the show:
Well, that’s all for today! If you want to support this project directly, you can do so by doing any of the following:
buying a ‘Gneiss Guy’ tote bag on my Bandcamp
listening to my music on Spotify and adding it to your playlists
forwarding this newsletter to a friend!
and if you haven’t already, subscribe:
Til next time! Be good,
Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶
