Last day on the mystery project today with drums and percussion, vocal comps, and violins. I’ve been here for two months and this is my last weekend in the studio. Sessioneer Craig arrives tonight, and I’ll be playing guitar on a bunch of his tracks and possibly singing one of his songs. He’s driving all the way from Atlanta to do this, and we’ll be setting up some amps and guitars for the Saturday session. You will be familiar with Craig’s songs from previous posts as Blueburst. There should be an album’s worth of material released in the not-too-distant future.
Last day of recording is always a race against time, and generally, you get everything done, but you never finish early, it’s always a late one as you tie up all the loose ends and try to listen through all the tracks with objective ears, listening for missing parts or things you could have done better. As you fade into the night, your eyes sting and your ears tire, and you have to stop, but I’m pretty sure we managed to get everything done. Now we have to mix, the next stage in the process.
The cicadas were screaming today as if the heat was torturing them into volume. The cats in the yard are rarely seen in the heat, hiding in the shade of a bush or under a car. The grass on the lawns here has thick blades, apparently tough enough to deal with the climate. When you walk on it, it’s spongy, as if you are walking on blancmange. On that subject, it’s been so long since I had blancmange, my grandmother used to make it in three flavours, vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate in a tin rabbit mould. I have a mould at the storage house but not the recipe, haha. I imagine it’s pretty simple, starting with 20 spoonfuls of sugar.
We eat Thai every night, and it’s been really good to only eat Asian food for dinner, no potatoes, although I must say that getting back to Porto for veggie sausages, peas, broccoli, and spuds, sounds exotic, haha. Traditional food in Portugal has a lot of fish and meat, no good for me, but then there are the cakes!
Music today has been Cockney Rebel’s debut album, The Human Menagerie (1973). I saw them live in Liverpool in 197? on tour with Be-Bop Deluxe, one of the greatest gigs of my life. The hit single Judy Teen wasn’t on the original albums. In those days, the album was the thing, the single was something else.