Monday morning, June 8th

At some point I rolled over to the Finnerty's house (home of Kathleen and Nora) to sleep on their couch. I don't think they were up yet, but it must have been close because Nora had to go to school that morning and I think she left around 7:30am or so. I'm pretty sure I got up around 9:30am or 10am or so and I I may have hung out with Kathleen for a bit over coffee, but I can't remember exactly. Hold on, she may have already left for work because I remember poring some curdled milk onto a bowl of cereal, throwing that all away, and making an omelette for myself. I think I finally rolled down to the Holiday around 11am.

Once I got to the Holiday I looked around for Delaney for a bit but never found him. Someone said they'd seen him up and about already but the day passed without us meeting up again. Wally, being the only logical one in the bunch, was still asleep in his room. After an hour or so of wandering about I finally decided I would try to push through some of the ideas Delaney and I had brainstormed out the night before when I'd shown him the guitar riff I had brought in my back pocket. He had suggested we make it into a sort of improvisational talk back-and-forth song with the chord changes between sections triggered whenever an "event" happened in the narrative. So I think I spent most of the day just sort of improvising this idea over and over hoping something more solid would appear from the mists.

At one point I decided I wanted to check my email and the Holiday didn't have wireless yet so I even though I had my espresso make ready and brewing I decided to take a trek over to Kick Coffeehouse and contribute to the local commerce in exchange for some internet access. I didn't even want a coffee really, but thought it only fair to buy one. So I bought a coffee and sat down to surf for a bit and sure enough their wireless was down. It was one of the few times all week that I was genuinely grumpy, lol. The lack of sleep, over-saturation of strong coffee, and dashed expectations all added up to Charlie excusing himself quietly from the cafe to find solace elsewhere. :-)

That night at dinner I finally found Delaney again but it was time for another bottle spinning ceremony so I knew we'd never get back to the 2nd song I'd been working on. Oh well, not every song gets completed, you know? And that's OK. At dinner I met up with Troy Therrien and we made plans to write together the following afternoon so I politely withdrew from the Monday night bottle spin because I knew I'd be too busy to focus the next day and I'd already set a date with Troy. I can't remember what else happened after dinner, but it's possible I went back to the Finnerty's relatively early. I may have started writing a song with Kim Manning and Josh Hemingway, but that may have been the following day too... the all-nighters had caught up to me.

Tuesday Morning June 9th

On Tuesday morning I was up pretty early and back at the Holiday. I sat out on the front lawn with a notebook and guitar, determined to push the song through that I'd started with Delaney. I wrote two full page "paragraphs" that outlined the two primary verses and had two sections mapped out in between and at the end that were left more open as unscripted improvs. I played the song over and over again on the lawn and finally went up to the studio and submitted the paper work to request recording time. Since the studios were still fairly wide open I wanted to see if I could sort of ram the thing through even though it was so loose and unstructured, a completely atypical song for me, way outside of my normal writing style. Kevin and Steve agreed to let me have a rip at it and I rounded up Wally to try to perform the guitar, word jazz vocal, and drums simultaneously because I knew there was no way I could record the guitar and vocal separately, they were just too intertwined.

So Steve set us up in the upstairs studio with Wally in the drum room and me in the main room on headphones. By this time I'd named the song "Raise It/Bring It Up" and it was a wild rhythmic ride through vacillating 5/4 and 6/8 time signatures... made all the more confusing by inability to maintain the 5/4 section consistently as I spoke over it almost completely out of meter. We practiced it several times together in the drum room first to see how it would come together and then proceeded to record four takes of the song, each one almost completely different. Wally was AMAZING. I'd written in a section after the 2nd verse where we could go into this sort of open percussion jam after I repeated the phrase "chase it, let it go" a bunch of times and he just sailed into it and owned it, it was killer.

The fourth take felt like we'd nailed it from my perspective, I was just flying, the whole jam felt other worldly, so we stopped the session to listen. The recording clocked in at over 7 minutes. As we listened I started to pick it apart... "wow, that section is killer!" followed by "hmmm, that section wanders a bit." and so on, back and forth. By the time we got to the end I was a bit deflated. I felt like maybe it needed more leg work on my part, re-tooling. We agreed to table the session. I didn't want to put any more instruments on it or commit any more resources to the recording at that point, and since we'd basically run four takes back to back live and hadn't used up a ton of studio time I felt that was the best path to take in case someone else had another song ready to go. But we all agreed there was some wonderful stuff in it and plenty of magic and passion that we could edit down later and make into something very special.

That night at dinner only two songs were played (all the songs that are recorded each day are usually mixed down with a rough mix and played for all the people at dinner). It felt very odd, we all knew people had been writing and recording, but I had this strange feeling that nothing was coming together, or nothing was actually getting completed... that's certainly how I felt anyway. The "Five Bucks" song from Monday morning was tabled in hopes of adding trumpet, clarinet, accordion, and now my 2nd song just felt like it had been a wildly daring experiment that (like many wildly daring experiments) didn't necessarily pan out as hoped.

That afternoon went by quickly and I never met up with Troy or Elliott as I had hoped, but I'm pretty sure I sat with Kim Manning and Josh Hemingway in the lobby of the Holiday motel to start working on Josh's fantastic "Don't Rain on My Parade" song. He had the chorus already, tied to this super syncopated calypso beat guitar part. he asked Kim and me if we had any lyric ideas and we worked through it pretty quickly, Kim and I brainstorming stuff out and flying ideas at Josh who acted as a sort of arbiter of cool on which lines were kept, it was awesome.

Later on I think I may have started working with Kim and Lantz on another song they were putting together in their room. Kim and I had so much fun writing together on Josh's song that she sort of lit up when I walked past her room and called out for me to come help. Things were starting to happen fast, people jumping in and out of sessions, asking for ideas, demoing songs for each other.

That night at dinner I jumped back into the bottle spinning ceremony and was paired up with two fellows I'd never met or even heard of really, Greg Roteik from Florida and Paul (never caught his last name) from Green Bay. We agreed to meet the next morning at the Holiday at 11am.

After dinner Troy and I met over in the lobby of the Holiday and spent some time writing a song together. We got the first verse and chorus done before running out of steam because it was a pretty heavy song and we just felt like we needed a break. As sometimes happens, we never got back together. We do have a recording of what we'd come up with to that point on my BR-600 however, hopefully he and I can finish that up later this summer.

The days are starting to run together here... I'm not exactly sure what I did that night. I remember waking up at the Finnerty's the next morning around 9:30am and making an omelette for breakfast in time to get down to the Holiday by 11am, and as I recall I'd only slept a few hours, so I'm pretty sure I stayed up all night again. Oh wait! I remember now. Tuesday night late... a bunch of us went over to the Beach Harbor for the open mic sometime around midnight I think. I was so wound up from writing that I just wanted to let loose, tear it up for a while, get all the toxins out. I busted in the door to see Erich Herbst playing with a violin player, drummer, and bass player. Someone else got up to play and I asked Erich when i could play and he said "Next?" and I said "Yeah!" and the game was on.

I jumped up and started a solo set with a Palmer Johnson Yacht/Twirl medley and I think I finished with Steel Bridge Tender. I was all revved up, way over the top. I jumped off stage and Christine Nesheim bought me a beer. Lumberjack Cash started playing sometime later, again with full band, and at one point he was playing this sort of Ska thing that I knew could work with my "Pie" song so I jumped up again and muscled the mic away from him to sing Pie and got the whole crowd shouting along. At this point you basically had to fight me to keep me off stage as I started bounding back and forth between the stage and the audience, egging people on to start dancing or shout along with whatever song was being played.

Somewhere along the line Wally walked in with Bobby Bryan and a bunch of others and eventually Wally stepped in for Jamie on drums *mid-song* (they were literally trading one drum stick and foot pedal at a time, until Wally had the throne, it was awesome) and Bobby Bryan just took over the rhythm guitar and put it into this cool funky Tom-Tom Club/Talking Heads like disco groove with Wally absolutely snapping the beat. It was sick! I just stared grabbing people up from their chairs and the dance floor was packed almost instantly. Landon was rapping and the place was bouncing and I jumped up and started rapping with Landon and then took the band into a verse of "Take Me To The River" and then jumped back into the crowd and danced like mad, and then jumped back up and launched into a verse of Tom-Tom Club's "James Brown" and jumped back into the audience again and danced like mad some more and it was EXACTLY what I needed because all the pent up toxins and weird energies that had built up just poured out me. I was sweaty and pumped up and flying and totally letting my inner front man run loose and it was so much fun.

I'm pretty sure I stayed there until close to bar time, then went back tot he Holiday and hung out for awhile. By that time it was so late that I didn't really want to go to the Finnerty's because I felt like I'd wake them up and I'd be all smelly from the bar smoke and dance sweat so I cleared out a spot in the station wagon again and crashed for a couple of hours there before making my way to the YMCA at 6am for my one work out of the week and more importantly a shower and change of clothes.

Another day of seeing the sun come up, maybe two hours sleep total. After the YMCA I drove over to the Finnerty's for maybe two more hours sleep, a bit of breakfast, and then back down to the Holiday to meet up with Greg and Paul for our 11am writing session.

Next Up: Wednesday 11am, and the act of writing and recording one of my favorite songs of the week...