The Crane Part II

The first of three videos is out today from a live session last spring! You can watch here.

We spent a day and a half at Ghost Hit and somehow managed to record two full length LPs of material AND capture three songs live on camera. I’ve been so humbled by everyone’s work on this project. As the world descends further into the madness of AI without most folks seeming to give a shit, this has come to mean so much to me. A group of people, in a room, or on a stage or a street corner, making music without any computer trickery. Are there things I would change about this performance? Of course. But it’s live…that’s the point. The glorious fallibility of us all.

An enormous thanks to all of the players:

Jesse Olsen Bay : Guitar
Mike Bullock : Contrabass
Jonathan Chen : Violin + Viola
Eric Hardiman : Electronics + Electric Bass Guitar
Andrew Oedel : Guitar
Tilden Pitcher : Drums

And thanks to Andrew Oedel at the console (and guitar!), Melissa McClung as Director of Photography, and Kai Langelier videographer and editor. It takes a village.

Those of you familiar with The Bellows will note how different this version is. I love them both, and treating this one as we did was entirely intentional. Music is an ever-evolving, living art form. A composition can be two very different things even a month apart; a fact that I adore.

I just finished overdubs for the first of the two records, which was an interesting process given my hand. While the pain has continued to diminish and my strength and endurance slowly rebuild, my mobility has not changed at all. I’m not even close to making a fist, something that both the physical therapist and the hand surgeon told me I will never do again. This of course has forced me to play the guitar in different ways, which can be incredibly frustrating at times, but also a form of expansion. The old parable about the barn burning down and being able to see the moon comes to mind. What can I gain from that which I have lost?

If I could, I would go back in time and NOT fall down the stairs, but it doesn’t work like that. My hand is fucked and I have to figure out how to keep making music with it the way that it is. The ‘pushing two magnets together in the way that they repulse each other feeling’ is a struggle, one that I cannot think about too often; the sensation is disconcerting and uncomfortable to say the least, but I suppose my brain will adapt at some point. I’m reading a book of interviews conducted by Alan Licht, and there is a section with the musician and music journalist Greg Tate speaking about Miles Davis recording Bitches Brew:

“Miles had that whole thing of the only way you get something new in music is you take the best musicians you can find and you make them play beyond what they know. There’s nobody playing any cliches on Bitches Brew; they’re forced into this environment where they’ve got to come up with wholly new solutions and responses in the moment, you know?”

Perhaps the limitation will push open some new doors.

In other news, my ep of covers will be out sometime in February, which was a really enjoyable, somewhat lo-fi experiment. My son drums on that as well, and I even convinced my daughter to play piano on the chorus’ of one tune. Next, I’ll be chipping away a things for the second LP from the filmed session, and trying to decide when to put things out. Does it matter? I really don’t know anymore. Then I head back into the studio with the folks in this video in late April, to make the sequel to The Bellows. I suppose the two LPS from the ‘video session’ fall somewhere in that web as well. It is all connected.

There is a fourth Shumoto and The Byrde record nearing the final stage of mixing, that will be available about a year from now. It is, in my humble, not-so-unbiased opinion, the most beautiful and compelling record Austin and I have made to date. I said to him at the studio last week that I feel sad so few people will get to hear it. Ah well………
The first three are no slouch, and if you haven’t listened to Bedtime Stories yet, it too is special.

That’s it for now. Enjoy the video and the rest of winter. It’s cold here in New England and I love it. The short, dark days, fires in the morning, candles at dusk, bundled up in wool. The crisp icy silence. The sound of boots on snow. I don’t start daydreaming about spring until February, but when I do, boy is it intense. You don’t realize how much you miss morning birdsong until it returns.

As always, thanks for reading and listening.