Jonah Smith: Dispatches

The EP

Last night I went to see my friend Dan Ryan's band at Union Hall. They're called
Le Loup. Dan used to book me at the Terrace Club in Princeton and a lot of his friends from those days were there. One of them was his successor at the Terrace Club, Ben Markowitz -- who also booked me their. Ben and I were talking about the EP which is a format that is more and more enticing to me. Initially, as I was looking over all of my material that I hope to record, The EP seemed like just a way to make something that is stylistically coherent, but without much advantage other than that.  Ben pointed out that with EPs you can make records faster and put them out more often. In this world where if you're out of the public eye for too long, you're forgotten is this a way to stay in the picutre? Hmmm, now it's starting to look appealing from an artistic and business standpoint. I'm thinking that it's a good possibility that you all will be getting more (smaller) doses of Jonah in the future. We'll see.

Video Blog 2

Some clips of me and Teddy K mixing a demo called "Watching The Water Rise". Not entirely sure how I feel about the song. Still kind of a work in progress, but I had fun working on it. In this clip I do some virtual organ overdubbing and my vocal (with Teddy's killer Neuman microphone) and some mixing.

Video Blog 1

okay, it's probably not the most fascinating video ever, but you gotta start somewhere. as i'm still learning how to do things like post vids, i'm hoping that this will be good practice for when i'm on the road and want to do this quickly.

so, here is a vid with bits and pieces of a demo session i did over at aaron's house the other day. i had at one point set up the camera and tried to record us doing a pass on a song but it didn't record so all i ended up with is overdubs. but you can see how a demos session might go...chart writing and reviewing, overdubs and some laughs. also unfortunate is that i didn't get on tape teddy kumpel's music biz stories.

teddy has been a friend for a few years now and has done some gigs with me and has been mixing all my demos for awhile. he's kind of like a where's waldo in the music biz showing up as a background singer for nine inch nails on MTV or playing banjo with feist on good morning america. plus he plays guitar on many of the will ferrell movie soundtracks like talledega nights.

anyway, hope you enjoy it....

Both Sides Now

Yesterday was an interesting day. I spent the first half of the afternoon talking about music and the second half making music. Guess which half was more enjoyable.

The first part of my day included a long lunch with Steve B and Jon from Relix. I guess they are still thinking that they want to be in business with me even if they don't know exactly how.

I told them that I'm happy to hear any ideas they have (they didn't seem to have anything specific in mind) . Mostly just chit chat about things going on in both our worlds.

They also told me about this company with a new recording technology that was interested in investing in my new record...this was what Tom Marshall was telling me about at the Relix Holiday party ( I will hopefully have more to report on this soon)

I left the meeting which was in the flatiron district of the city and headed back to Brooklyn where i reconvened with my van and made my way over to my friend, Jon Solo's place. He called me up a couple of weeks back and said that he'd been working on demos over at his place and we should get together and play a little and see what happens. Sounded good to me. To be honest, I was really happy just for an opportunity to work on some music. I have a backlog of some songs that I haven't demoed yet, so i brought over a few ideas to his place.

He's basically got a similar situation at his place for making demos as me, (which is to say, very basic) but he's got a nicer Baldwin piano than I have (and in decent tune) and a nice Martin acoustic. He's a pianist by trade (he plays with Jamie Mcclean - formerly of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) but he plays a little bit of everything.

So we ended up just hanging out in his apartment and building up a track from scratch. He made a kick drum and snare sound by tapping on the body of the guitar. Then, I overdubbed the piano - which he had me double in a higher register (a cool new recording trick, i love those). Then he put down an acoustic track and a bass track. Then i sang the vocal and the harmonies. And then we filled out the percussion with a tamborine that i played like a hand drum and then i ended up putting a little harmonica on at the end.

All in all, considering we did it with one microphone in his apartment in a couple of hours, I think it sounds pretty good.  I'll do a little mix of it today or tomorrow and post it here. Let me know what you think...