Well we are alive in Los Angeles. We are creating new music, playing old songs, raising kids, making new friends, loving old friends. We’re doing life. We are also in the process of moving, so that’s all consuming. It’s a good move, just within town. More on that later.

This blog nags at me, taunts me, dares me to update. After awhile with no updates, as with all things shameful, I tend to ignore it. I have been considering a full blown autobiographical download of all the things we’ve learned in the past two years, as this move closes the chapter on a painful, thrilling, difficult, rewarding, and ultimately empowering season. I have also been considering the reality that I need to spend some time learning and mastering Wordpress, so that we can have a proper blog, one tied to Facebook and Twitter and all that good stuff.

But first, I have to go back to packing boxes. I’ve learned that the way I’m wired is that I have a mental queue. I can only eyeball the top five or so needs at any given moment. I’ve decided to stop pretending that this is not how I’m wired, and embrace it instead.

So, for the moment, allow me to share that we’re back at the Hotel next Friday night, July 17th. We will rawk it.

The Dailies @ The Hotel Cafe
July 17th, 2009 @ 9pm
1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Later!

We’re debuting the live version of The Tempest, so even if you’ve seen us before, there’s something fresh. This is our absolute favorite venue to play, and we’d love to see you.

Tomorrow night, April 4th, we’re playing at a place called Crane’s Hollywood Tavern. We’re a little sketchy about it, as it appears to be a bit of a dive, and we’ve learned that if we’re going to get our people out, it’s a good idea to have a nice place to invite them. This… may not be the case for tomorrow.

Thus far, we’ve been using Facebook and MySpace and word of mouth to get people out, with pretty good results. Good enough, anyways, to get invited back to one of the best singer / songwriter venues in L.A.

But for tomorrow, we want to try something different. So… we’re trying a little experiment. For our date night tonight, we’re just going to go canvas the neighborhood around Crane’s and meet people, pass out flyers and even perhaps a few of our pre-production CDs, and see if we can get people out that way. It’s going to be a little adventure.

Think promotional thoughts for us!

Go check it out!

We’ll be back to more behind the scenes blogging in a bit…

So, I play just enough bass guitar to get myself in trouble. I picked up the instrument a few years back because I wanted to try something new and I thought, “Hey… I only have to worry about one note at a time… how hard can it be?” I took one lesson, and off I went. It was Rosy, actually, who sorta taught me how to play bass. About three years ago, Mike, Corey, Rosy, and I were hired to back up some friends of ours on a weekend gig at Hume Lake. This weekend was actually the first time The Dailies band played together, and lead to the making of the first record later that year.

Rosy at one point actually said to me something like… “Watch my kick drum. Don’t play a note unless you see me hitting the kick.” Some of you might be thinking… man… for him to say that… you must have been really bad. You’d be right. However, even though I’m a pretty noob-i-licious bass player, I’m a pretty good musician, and it all worked out. I do U2 style 8th notes quite well, thanks,

Anyways. I actually played bass on the 1st record, which is one of the many reasons why it has a for more garage band feel than this new one. After attempting to play a few gigs, singing and playing and fumbling and mumbling, we decided to hire a pro, our friend Dana Decker.

Playing bass, even though I’ll never be Sting, has lead me to make better choices as a musician, as a songwriter… well… most of the time. More on that in a moment. Even a rudimentary understanding of the instrument helps out. I’ve actually had a couple of bass players comment that it’s more fun to play with me when I’m on keys, because I stay out of their way these days. But I digress…

So we’re working on this song, “The Tempest,” and it all starts with a bass line and a hook idea. It was actually one of the first songs written for the project, which, I think, contributed to the issues we were having later on. It took a little while for the songwriting engine to get cranked up and firing on all cylinders.

So, we write the tune, and I demo it up. The bass line in question happens right at the 0:13 mark, and then loops… endlessly. I want you all to know that this is an exercise in humility for me to share this with you, but it’s a brave new interactive world out there, and here goes nothin’

[See post to listen to audio]

Man… that was rough. Glad we made it through there. So, if you’re like me, I hope you heard a lot of potential, but you most likely heard a fair amount of mush and dissonance. We did, too. At this point, as creative people, you start to rationalize with yourself.

“Well… that arrangement doesn’t quite work, but I really like the lyrics and the melody, and it’ll be fine once the band plays it.”

We moved on to other tunes, and other demos, and there you go. By the time we got to Eldorado a few months later, I was moderately dreading this tune. So many of the others, like Signal Chain, had seemed to pour so easily from the pen. Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize, and off we go.

Now, once the band played it, it did sorta come into focus. A bit. On a rock tune, nothing will help it feel better like a real guitar player and a real drummer. However, we were still a bit troubled by it. It just didn’t… feel right, and so many of the others felt great.

Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize… “Well… once the final vocals are in place, it’ll come into focus.”

We finish tracking week, and head home. Again… this tune is at the bottom of our list of favorite tunes, which is really bumming me out, because I had such high hopes for it when we started out. I mean… what a great bass line, right? Can I get a what what? Anyone? Moving on.

One of the big struggles when tracking this one was finding the right keyboard part. Mike is not exactly shy about coming up with great parts, but nothing really settled down. He took a few cracks at it in the studio, then I sat down and did one, and nothing felt right. The Rhodes part that you’ll hear below is actually me, spending WAAAY too much time at home trying to make it fit.

This is a rough mix, coming from our computer, after we had finished tracking the leads. Ok… we can make it through, ok? This story has a happy ending. You really don’t have to listen to the whole thing, unless you’re a HUGE Dailies fan. Or a masochist. For some reason, this particular bounce hit the 2-bus too hard, and all the distortion somehow adds to the fact that the arrangement sucks.

[See post to listen to audio]

Rationalize, rationalize, rationalize. “Well… the problems with this song will be resolved once it’s all mixed and pretty.” This actually turned out to be true, but not in the way we thought.

When we finished all the vocal tracking, and were prepping for mix, I wrote up a whole mess of notes and ideas for Stick, our mixer. Keep in mind that Stick is a songwriter, player, producer, and arranger, as well as a mixer. He, like so many of us, wears any musical hat that will keep his kids eating food and the house out of foreclosure. Most of my notes were things like this, “So, on the 1st verse of this tune, I really like the guitar lick at bar 14, so make sure it’s up enough in the mix to hear it.”

On The Tempest, this was my note:

“This is our problem child song. Save this one for a day when you’re feeling like a challenge. Any and all ideas you have will be welcomed. Feel free to employ anything you can think of to give the song more arc.”

So, we clone our drive. FedEx the copy to him, and he goes to work. Now, June (Stick’s wife) told me a story after the mix was completed that went something like this. “Well, Chad, it’s funny… For about three days he was at work in the studio, and he’d come back happy and energized. Then, one night, he came in all downcast. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘Hmmm…. I just don’t know what I’m gonna do with this song.’”

Stick called me the next morning and said…. “How much leeway do I have with tune.” Considering I was on the verge of cutting it from the album, I answered, “How much leeway do you want?”

“Well,” he said, “I think we can keep the Drums, the B3 (organ) and the vocals.” I remember thinking to myself… at least he said we could keep the vocals.

The problem lay in the bass. With all that movement, all that schmutz, there was just nowhere for everyone else to go. Also, the nature of the line I wrote lead everyone else to play like it was some sort of southern fried rock tune, instead of a modern rock anthem. He put together a demo for his idea and sent it to me.

[See post to listen to audio]

Aaaaah yes. Everything gets simplified. Everything falls into place. Gone is the bass part that dominates and muddies everything. In it’s place, big guitars and a signature keyboard part. I love this guy! The other major change comes in the chorus. The original version went like this:

G//// G7//// C//// Cm7////

Stickman changed one chord, and the entire character of the thing changes.

G//// Em7//// C//// Cm7////

All of a sudden our little red headed stepchild is getting straight A’s and dating the prom queen. Now the fun begins. All the guitars you heard were Stick hammering away his studio and the bass is a sample, from Spectrasonic’s Trilogy plug-in. Turns out that Corey was going to be in studio the following day, for an unrelated session. Also turns out that they had the whole day booked and only about four hours of work scheduled. Corey, Stick, and I got on the phone and talked through the new parts, and off he went. Dana, excited to get to play a proper bass part, stopped by our place the next day and laid down some stank.

So, after a few more tweaks, and a little more love, here’s a final mix:

[See post to listen to audio]

Since this is a big, loud, four chord rock tune, it really benefited from the mastering process.

[See post to listen to audio]

So, what’s the moral of this story? Well, it’s simple! Write bad arrangements and then hire a great mixer to fix everything for you! Rationalize those structure issues away! Next song!

So, the actual moral of this songwriting near-miss-almost-disaster is this: I will not be fixed in the mix. A big studio won’t fix it. A great vocal won’t fix it. If your song isn’t working, it isn’t working. Strip it bare and find what’s wrong. Do not get attached. If I’m being perfectly honest, I think this track could have been even stronger still if we had done the extreme makeover earlier in the process.

As it is, we’re pretty grateful that we were able to not only keep it in the mix, but that it turned out to be one of our favorites. We were affirmed in that feeling a few weeks ago, when Crucial Music selected it as one of six of our tunes that will be added to their library.

If this tune goes platinum, I’ll have to do something really nice for Stick, like get him a monogrammed pen or a gift card to Starbucks or something. We know how to take care of our people, ya’ll.

It’s actually tough to describe an experience like attending a Road Rally. If you follow that preceding link, scroll down through the offered seminars and panels, and marvel at the sheer number of options we stared down. By the time we got home last night, after driving from LAX to Irvine to rendezvous with Grandma and Grampa who had been hanging with the kiddos, and then back to Thousand Oaks, unpacked the car, located our toothbrushes, and collapsed into bed, we both commented that we could not remember a moment in our lives when we were more exhausted.

The Taxi Road Rally is like one part Amway Convention, one part schmooze-fest, one part American Idol auditions, and one part love-fest-hootenanny. The lobby of the hotel would become a surreal scene indeed every night after the last seminar ended. Everywhere you looked, musicians were just hanging out. Pretty boys with their guitars singing love songs. Hip hop guys with their laptops and headphones. Old, long haired rock dudes swapping war stories. It was truly a strange mixture of camaraderie and competition.

We had hoped for, like everyone trying to “Make it,” some sort of Grand Slam moment, where the stars align, and someone with power and influence changes our lives forever, like for Mariah Carey in the movie “Glitter.” (For those of you who don’t yet get my dry sense of humor… that’s a joke.)

We did not have a Grand Slam, but we sure felt like we had a few solid line drive singles and even a double. We were fortunate enough to have prior relationships with a few of the panelists, the industry pros. They were, in turn, kind enough to introduce to other industry type folks who were there. That kind of intro is worth it’s weight in gold compared to just a cold, unknown, “Hi my name is blah blah blah and I think you’d like this blah blah blah…”

If anyone we met this weekend makes it to this blog and reads this… know that we had a great time meeting you all. Leave us a message, and tell us you were here! We felt very blessed to be musicians this past weekend.

Many thanks to Michael Laskow and all the TAXI people for a great time.

We’ve been working feverishly. The hard drive (well… the duplicate hard drive) got shipped to The Stickman three days ago, and tomorrow he begins his work.

So much to share with you all, but it’s too late tonight.

I thought that starting tomorrow, I’d go through song by song, and just talk about our music. I thought I’d tell you where we were and what we were thinking when we wrote it. Stories about the songs from the Big studio, from the home studio, from our hearts.

This record is so big and yet so close to us. I lack perspective. I need sleep.

Goodnight.

It’s not enough for me, as a writer, to think about a love song in touchy-feely, you-make-me-all-squishy-inside type language. I think most of those songs are really about how the other person makes you feel, rather than actually telling that person why you love them, or what’s lovable about them. Most love songs seem like the writer is really just in love with the feelings that the other person gives them, which isn’t love at all.

I dig the way all the imagery shook out. It’s not obvious to compare your woman to a cup of morning coffee, but if you really love coffee as I do, it makes perfect sense. If you’ve spent any time with Erica, you know that she’s dynamic. There aren’t many situations to which she can’t adapt and thrive. One of my favorite things about her is that she’s gonna do just fine talking to a homeless dude as she is with a presidential candidate.

Thinking about arranging, this one was interesting, as… well, it’s clearly about a girl. The girl in question… is also the girl singing. We just decided to go with it in the choruses, and I thought Erica came up with a brilliant solution in the verses, especially the way it develops in the 2nd verse.

Oddly, this was actually the very first vocal I laid down, way back in May. I was thinking… “Hey… this one’s gonna be easy. All laid back and cool. No sweat.” I was wrong. It was a nasty vocal to get sounding right. So exposed. The band, heeding my request, played every note just perfectly. No waste, no filler, lots of space. Lots of room for the ear to hear every little nuance and flub of the voice. Great thinking, Chad.

All’s well that ends well, and this one has gone… well… yes, very well, indeed.

Enjoy.

[See post to listen to audio]

P.S. Like at the end of this track, we have this running band commentary. Some of them are hilarious, and we’re thinking about leaving a few of them on. Thoughts?

That seems a little counterproductive, doncha think? I mean… you’re in the business of making fans and playing shows, right? Doesn’t it help if you, you know, invite people to come hear you?

Well… technically, yes.

Tuesday afternoon, our friend Ash called. Aly and Ash are good, longtime friends, and quite creative, both on their own and as a couple. Ash sings with a band of talented lads called Give Away Your Hearts.

He told me that they were playing a show this upcoming Sunday in Ventura, and he wanted to know if we wanted to come open for them. Turns out we couldn’t make it in time to open for them due to another commitment, and because Ash is just cool like this, he goes, “Fine… we’ll open for you then.”

Now, Erica and I have been approaching the live thing with fear and trembling, I can’t lie. All ya’ll know that when Mike, Dana, Rosy, and Corey join us, the rafters shake and the house is rocked. However, and this has been an ongoing problem for us, is that these guys are busy professionals, and play they music for a living. It’s not a hobby… that’s why we like them.

However, coordinating schedules and making sure we have a big enough venue to justify paying for their time has proven difficult. When you’re an unknown indie, you can’t be sure that a hundred people are gonna show up, and enough of them are going to buy your CD for you to afford to pay the band and break even. We realized pretty quickly that it was simply not economically viable to take the band wherever we went as we were building a following. When the full Dailies band plays together, there are nine children represented between the four families. Kids gotta eat!

So, when we were writing this second record, we asked ourselves over and over again, “Can we play this song with our without the band?” See, Erica and I are singers, first and foremost. We both play piano, however, nothing screams NOT INDIE ROCK like two piano players in a band, in my ever so humble opinion. Maybe two french horn players, but that’s about it.

So, Erica took it upon herself to learn guitar, and I started playing bass, in fact some of you remember that I actually played bass on “What it Is.” You’ll also notice that I hired a pro for the second record, so you can imagine how I felt about my own performance. The bottom line is that we’re not great instrumentalists. We have devoted most of our musical energy and time over the years to develop our singing ability.

We’ve started finding places to play, with just the two of us. We played a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, totally unamplified. We played a mom’s group at a local church (don’t ask.) Today, we played a bar.

We didn’t invite you, or even tell anyone, because we’re finding our way. We’re not ready to sound the alarm, and invite the world to see what we’ve prepared. We need to play a few more gigs under the radar and figure out who we are as artists separate from the band.

Oh, be assured, the band will play, and they will bring the thunder. But sometimes, they won’t, and we must be ready. Today we played for a handful of people, only a few of whom had any remote investment in us personally.

But it still worked. It was rough, but it worked. We held them in our little musical bubble. We played for maybe two dozen people in Ventura in the middle of the afternoon, but I will go to sleep tonight feeling like we took a major step towards the future.

Aly shot some video. I look forward to editing together a few snippets to share with you all.

We promise to invite you to the actual gig next time.

It’s also a long workday for me, and I’m working on tracking a guide vocal as I build a track, or at least a functional arrangement for a song called “Kiss Us Goodbye.” Erica and I have made a very rough, one-mic-in-the-room demo of this song already, but we have nothing to listen to and work against that’s presentable.

I used to wait until the end to put a vocal in place, but the more I do this, the more I realize that on in a singer / songwriter situation, what needs to happen is a melody right up the middle ASAP. Everything gets built around the vocal.

So it’s 4:30 on a melancholy Wednesday, and I am going to go put down a scratch on a melancholy song. Coffee is in hand… sheesh.. I’m even wearing a sweater. The mood is set. Off we go.

More tomorrow, future readers. More tomorrow.