The Hanslick Rebellion played a gig on March 2 – our first in four years. It was awesome (for us, anyway). We agreed to keep things going in spite of the band members’ various familial commitments and the physical distance between us. Playing shows together is difficult, but recording is always possible, and since the Rebellion always goes big we decided to tackle the most daunting monster project in my catalog: the unfinishable Rise And Shine.

We’re talking 40 songs in almost as many genres. 15 singers. Two-and-a-half hours of music. My last attempt to record this thing put me off music for over a year.

Rise And Shine is a musical stage play I’ve been working on since 2000, when Arturo Vega informed me that he’d strung together 20 or so of my already-released tracks to tell a story and had already begun writing the script. We brainstormed a complete three-act arc and I began writing new songs to fill in the gaps – 20 additional pieces of music in all. By 2005 I was well into a fully-cast demo of the thing with an incredible and diverse group of singers that included Dicky Barrett, Brian Dewan, Jessy Moss, Matthew Bair, CJ Ramone, Maryann Fennimore, Bryan Thomas and Kitty Kowalski. But we couldn’t stop tweaking, and what was, in retrospect, the perfect version of the play got mauled to death by revision after revision. I gave up on the demo in 2006 because I just couldn’t keep up with all the changes. By the time we took our last meeting, in 2010, we couldn’t even explain to an interested investor what Rise And Shine was supposed to be about. That’s when I packed it in.

The storyline, as plotted in 2000 and held consistent until 2005, is fairly simple – two college friends reunite at a New York City nightclub five years after graduation. One night, a girl from their past appears at the club and fucks all their shit up. That’s basically it. You’ve got a cast of colorful supporting characters representing various denizens of early-aughts New York nightlife, each with a mini-drama woven around the main thread, but it really is straightforward, linear and fun.

Hanslick Rebellion is the no-brainer choice for a Rise And Shine recording. A number of the songs Arturo wrote his script around, including “We Wait And We Wait”, “Leave Your Boyfriend”, “Starlet” and “Grub”, are Rebellion tunes. Better yet, because the Rebellion only recorded live, there were never studio versions of these, so it’s not like we’re being redundant. Plus Mike and I sang the two male leads on the original Rise And Shine demo, with some surprising lead vocal reversals that add a twist for longtime Rebellion fans (for example, Mike sings “Grub” in the play). It’s just right.

My first move in reopening the Rise And Shine case was to sift through the aborted demo recordings and see what might be salvageable. Sadly, not much. For all the vocal talent we had lined up, most of the tracks are unusable. We had such limited time with many of the singers that in some cases we were racing through 20-30 songs in a day. You obviously can’t get good takes that way. Then there’s the file management and handling of those vocal tracks – many were hastily and poorly auto-tuned by the engineer and then the original tracks were discarded! Unbelievable now, but at the time there were no best practices for Pro Tools workflow. The only singers whose work I can confidently keep are Maryann Fennimore, Brian Dewan and Jessy Moss, and those only because their vocals were cut so late in the process that the project stalled before the engineer could mutilate them. Everybody else has to be rerecorded (which is impossible in several cases) or replaced.

On the other hand, all 40 songs are written and arranged right down to the vocal harmonies. It’s all laid out… everything just needs to be properly performed. The undertaking is massive – recording it is only the beginning. Mixing and mastering 40 songs will cost a fortune. I get queasy just thinking about it. Unfortunately, the folks who were willing to invest in Rise And Shine the stage play are probably out on Rise And Shine the album. I understand; there’s a lot more potential ROI in the former.

In order to make this happen as quickly as possible (ha ha) I’m throttling back on my other projects for a while. That means April’s Single of the Month will be the last. My next solo album is just about done, so I do plan on putting it out later this year. But other than that I’ll be in Rise And Shine land for the forseeable future.

As we power through this thing, we’ll do our best to document the process with a series of video clips. Here’s the first one. This is actually an excerpt from a short film made by Emily Sheskin and Serena Kuo in 2004? 2005? I forget exactly. But it features Arturo and me talking about the musical and how we came to be writing partners:

I keep hearing that the ’90s are “back”. I can kinda see it… I mean, there’s flannel plaid on every mannequin at the mall. But it’s like when all the hair metal bands reverbed up their drums, strung half a dozen blues riffs together and claimed to be channeling Zeppelin. C’mon, Led Zep was about so much more than that.

Reality Bites was available on demand so I watched it last night. I had never seen the movie… at the time it got too much hype, so true to my Gen X roots I passed on it. Watching it now depressed the living shit out of me. I don’t know that the film really captured the essence, the energy of the time – in fact, nah, it didn’t – but it did serve to remind me how cool the ’90s were. How cool we were. How cool we’re not now.

I’ve beaten generational demographics to death in other posts, and that’s only a smidge of the story here anyway. This is really about nostalgia.

I spend a lot of time dicking around in my own past. Not just musically. I use Facebook every day. For people my age, Facebook is a Ouija board through which we contact spirits from our past. You send out messages; ghosts reply from beyond. You can correspond with them, recount memories, share inside jokes. But you’ll never encounter one in person. They don’t exist in the real world – they’re spectral apparitions of people whose bodies still walk the earth, but are now being used for different lives, with different interests, different priorities, personalities marked and molded by experiences that did not include you.

I don’t mean to say that a Facebook seance isn’t enjoyable and comforting – it is, or we wouldn’t all engage in them every day – or that you wouldn’t appreciate the person your old pal has become if you got to know each other again in real life. But for the most part, the interaction is less a friendship than a mutual haunting.

My favorite musical endeavor lately is Sevendys – I think I’ve made that clear. Fresh music, wonderful new collaborators. I find it exciting and energizing. But my second favorite right now is Skyscape. Maybe it’s because the ’90s are back, or maybe it’s because, for Skyscape, they never ended.

Dom and I (and our legion of bandmates) generated so much material so quickly, and recorded so much of it, that I have albums’ worth of Skyscape music stored in bite-sized lo-fi chunks on old 4-track cassettes and floppy discs. A lot of it is terrible. Most of it is badly performed and indifferently recorded. But it’s full of energy and ideas which are begging to be harnessed and shaped by experienced hands.

When we work on Skyscape music, so much of it is about the people we are today – the skills we’ve developed, the attention to craft and context. But just as much of the process involves the people we were in the ’90s, the kids who built this foundation of ideas and sensibility, who laid down the trail of breadcrumbs by leaving so many recorded artifacts behind. On a Skyscape record, instrumental components are sourced from 20 years of material, as though everyone who was ever in the band is still a member – eternally young, free and full of passion.

For me, bringing these tracks together is like living in all times of my life at once. I think that’s how so many people my age are desperate to feel; I’m grateful to that younger version of me for the opportunity.

Here’s a perfect example in progress. This track started as a Portastudio recording made live at Dom’s 1992 high school graduation party. I was using my 4-track as a mixer and took the opportunity to pop in a cassette. The band was horrible… it wasn’t even really a band. Dom, Rob Hill, Sean Gould and I set up in a line – two guitars, no bass or drums. But our attempt at covering “Hey Jude” was as hilarious as it was awful, and I decided to see what I could make of it.

I thought adding a deadpan full-band arrangement would help the vocals seem even funnier and more absurd. Step one was to add drums. My preference was to have drums that sounded similarly 4-tracked, and sure enough I was able to find a suitable performance: drums from early 1993, when we were demoing songs for Band Of The Week. In this case, we pointed one microphone towards Loren Wiseman’s basement kit and he played “Age Song” at a tempo which was, coincidentally, a dead match for “Hey Jude”. I flew the drums in, added some tambourine, piano and a couple of backing vocals, and here we are. Still needs bass, guitar and more backup singers, but it’s turning into something listenable and fun!

Skyscape | “Hey Jude” | rough mix
Domenic Maltempi: vocals
Dom’s cousin Tina: vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, backing vocals, tambourine
Lisa Brennan: backing vocals
Loren Wiseman: drums
Rob Hill: guitar
Sean Gould: guitar
Adapted from a live recording at Dom’s house, July 1992

Whoa, a little Descendents action in the title there!

One of the best things about making music is that it comes with pictures, and you get to choose what picture comes with your music. Not even the death of physical product has spoiled the symbiotic relationship between music and album cover. Awesome for me; album art is the place where my two passions intersect.

As much as I love designing for print and dimensional objects, I have to admit that the digital album cover presents specific challenges which are very satisfying to meet. In digital, you only get one small image to make your impression – there’s no inner sleeve, no booklet, not even a back cover. You’ve got to be perfectly on point. Clear, vivid imagery; metaphors have to be extra clever because they have to be extra simple.

In digital, as in print, color choices need to be just right. The color of album art can have an almost synaesthetic effect, causing the listener to associate that color with the music, and that absolutely does affect the listening experience. I still “hear” Faith No More’s Angel Dust as blue, and their King For A Day as red… prescient choices on the designer’s part, or simply my reaction to the packaging?

I love doing referential stuff, period stuff. With our “classic American music in classic American studios” approach, Sevendys has given me a chance to have fun with classic American musical design. Since each song is being treated as a single, I’ve had to make a corresponding “cover” for every one and I’m having a LOT of fun so far.

Here are some notes on the concepts and techniques behind these designs. Maybe one day I’ll do a cover-by-cover retrospective post on every item in my back catalog (assuming you missed the Art of Eschatone Records exhibition in Brooklyn a couple years ago), but for brevity(and sanity)’s sake I’ll keep this to the first four Sevendys illustrations.

“City Of My Dreams”
My friend and frequent collaborator Michael Doret recently designed an awesome typeface called Steinweiss Script. It’s based on the “Steinweiss scrawl”, the calligraphy developed in the 1940s by Alex Steinweiss, the Columbia Records art director who invented the album cover. Since this would be the first piece of Sevendys art, I figured why not take it from the top and do a tribute to Steinweiss?

“I Hate Love”
This song is technically the “double A-side” of “City Of My Dreams”, so I wanted to play in roughly the same era design-wise. In both pieces, the color palette is limited and all the elements are built out of repeated simple geometric shapes – “City Of My Dreams” is just a series of rectangles, and everything on the “I Hate Love” cover is made of circles. For a vintage look, I messed with both illustrations to make them look like they’d been printed slightly out of register.

Also, honestly… I can’t believe no one thought of the heart-shaped mushroom cloud before me. I’m still waiting for somebody to come forward and ruin my moment.

One welcome side-effect of starting so simple was that it helped me work my drafting chops back into shape. During my decade-plus of art direction, I hadn’t spent much time in the trenches doing any actual illustrating – conceptualizing and compositing are not the same thing as getting in there with your hands and scribbling. I’m still warming up, but after the first two covers I began to feel confident enough to forge ahead with the next round of Sevendys artwork – two pieces I might have otherwise farmed out.

“So So Close”
When I was in college, I was way into the work of Victor Moscoso. I loved psychedelic art in general, but to me, Moscoso’s stuff had something extra. Maybe it was his “vibrating color” – the way he would put opposing colors right next to each other with no borders – or his truly creative sense of layout. If you look back at old Skyscape flyers and demo covers, that’s me biting Moscoso’s rhymes hard. Not that I could even come close; his concepts are super high, and his techniques are his alone.

I had the chance to work with Moscoso on packaging for The Cutting Room Floor, and it was such a thrill for me. He still has it, and he doesn’t use computers to get it (though I learned that he does make pretty heavy use of Xerox machines). Moscoso was able to superimpose multiple images in a way that created a compelling illusion (look at the cover through a pair of old red-and-blue 3-D glasses, one eye at a time, to see what I mean) while still being beautiful at a glance.

The “So So Close” cover design is a tribute to Moscoso: the simple negative-space illusion created by lettering, the vibrating placement of borderless green and blue on a red background. By the way, you haven’t missed this track – the song’s not mixed yet. March, if not sooner!

“When I Step Off The Train”
This one’s a nod to all of the Big Five San Francisco poster artists – it’s got a little something from each one. The colors are the same as “So So Close” (plus black and the white of the paper) because the two pieces will be screenprinted onto one jacket when both songs are released on 7-inch. The vibrating color is your Moscoso connection; the deconstructed-train columns on the sides are, to me, reminiscent of the techno-psychedelia Stanley Mouse was doing well into the Eighties; the use of the Art Nouveau block lettering is a Wes Wilson thing; the Mucha-like columnar composition, including the Nouveau ornaments in the upper corners and outline of the hippie girl’s hair, is something all of the Five used, but none so faithfully as Alton Kelley.

Both this and “So So Close” were sketched on paper, then scanned and completed in Illustrator. Knowing that they’d eventually be printed, I felt comfortable giving both designs a bit more detail. Oh! The diamond checkerboard area at the bottom is not wasted space – it’s a spot for the band to sign and number when the singles are pressed. Just sayin.

By the way, here is an almost-finished mix of “When I Step Off The Train”, just in. The single won’t be out for a while, and the mix still needs one or two more tweaks, but why not stream it anyway?

Sevendys | “When I Step Off The Train” | in-progress mix
Jed Davis: keyboards, vocals
Avi Buffalo: guitars
Sheridan Riley: drums, tambourine
Chuck Rainey: bass
Recorded at SugarHill, Houston, TX
Mixed by Eric Jarvis

Lots of music is getting made but none of it is being posted in this blog! Let’s fix this.

The members of Avi Buffalo are among my favorite humans. They inspire me and restore my faith in the future of music. And they put my picture in the “Influences” box on their MySpace page… not even the Beach Boys were worthy of such an honor!

Avi and I have been jamming whenever the band comes to town. We record these guitar-keyboard improvisations into Pro Tools and then overdub whatever seems right – usually a track of sounds captured by microphone. Not necessarily vocals; mostly odd mouth noises or scraping of the mic against objects, which we bus through effects that are tweaked on the fly. I would never have thought to play an effect like an instrument, but it’s second nature to Avi.

We’ve got more than an album’s worth of this stuff recorded and a lot of it is surprisingly listenable. It helps that Avi has an almost supernatural connection to his guitar and complete understanding of the effects he runs it through. And I think it’s clear that we’re having fun. We’re gonna press the results to vinyl (one 35-minute jam had to be cut down by a third just to fit on one side of the record). I want to call the project Space Toilets, but I haven’t gotten a thumbs-up from Avi yet so this may be the first and last time you hear that name.

Here’s the first piece we recorded:

Avi Buffalo and Jed Davis | “The Wizard’s Demon End”
Avi Buffalo: guitars, vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, vocals
Produced by Avi Buffalo and Jed Davis
Recorded by Jed Davis
Mixed by Avi Buffalo

Last weekend I brought my laptop and Pro Tools rig to the ATP festival and we did some tracking in the hotel room. In addition to the aforementioned 35-minute improv, we added Avi’s beautiful guitaring to a tune I’ve been building for quite a while. This is a song for Failing Upwards called “Never Turn My Back”:

Jed Davis | “Never Turn My Back” rough mix | September 11, 2010
Jed Davis: vocals, keyboards
Avi Buffalo: guitars
Anton Fig: drums
Stevie Blacke: strings

Meanwhile, work continues on the record I’m producing for Kole. We’ll be finishing up drums over the next couple of days and moving on to bass. Here’s one of the raw tracks Jerry will be drumming on; I wrote the first draft of this song based on stuff that was going on in Kole’s life, and then she ran with it wonderfully, tweaking the lyric and adding some really touching, very personal stuff.

Kole | “The Good Parts” demo | August 4, 2010
Kole Hansen: vocals
Jed Davis: piano

I do have some disappointing news to report: the 15th anniversary of the Hanslick Rebellion is gonna come and go pretty quietly. We weren’t able to get a recording schedule together, so we have nothing to release. It’s too bad. We did have some excellent material written, which I hope we’ll be able to bring to you someday. Maybe if we start working toward the 20th anniversary now, we might make it.

Here’s my rough demo of one of the tracks we sadly won’t be recording this fall: “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts”.

The Hanslick Rebellion | “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts” demo | May 31, 2010

I don’t often write songs for girls. It’s a waste of time. Like sending flowers. By the time you write the song (or send the flowers), it’s too late. The girl has already decided whether she’s interested; you’re not gonna change her mind.

Songs about girls – now, I have lots of those. But they’re for me, not for the girl.

The last time I sent anyone flowers was Valentine’s Day, 1996. I had gotten dumped hard by a girl named Rachel. I knew there was absolutely no chance of talking her out of it, so I included this note:

Rachel,
Either take me back, or take these flowers.
Jed.

The flowers weren’t really for Rachel (though she did end up taking them!). They were for me.

Here’s a song I actually did write for a girl. I found myself in a spot a while back; I had this notion that my birthday dinner with an old friend might’ve had some romantic import. For me to even pick up on something like that is a big deal… if there is a form of gaydar that pings people who are into you, I ain’t got it.

I was staying at the Chelsea for the weekend; my friend walked me back there after dinner and we awkwardly called it a night on the corner by the subway. I returned to my room with this sinking feeling that I might have just fucked up a date by not realizing I was on one.

Well, Jed, my shitty brain said to me, what better way to find out than to ask your buddy directly, via Facebook message, RIGHT NOW?

I got as far as typing that message. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s how to avoid actually doing most of the things my wack-ass brain tells me to do. So instead of sending the note, I shut myself in a Chelsea Hotel bathroom – at midnight – and sang it in four-part harmony into a recording app on my iPhone.

Jed Davis | “Question” rough mix | August 18, 2010
Jed Davis: vocals
Recorded on an iPhone at the Chelsea Hotel
Subject’s name bleeped to protect… me!

I was pleased enough with the results that I thought the song worth forwarding to its addressee. Turns out it had been a date, but she saw no reason to go on another. I like to tell myself that at least I got a song out of it.

Here’s a rough demo I did up yesterday for the new Rebellion album, when I should have been unpacking.

I apologize for the sketchy vocal. I tend to flatten out on the high notes when I record at home – it’s a longstanding mental block that has to do with the neighbors being able to hear me.

“Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts” is all that was written on the sheet of paper found in Stephen Foster’s pocket when he died, penniless. Nobody knows if it was to be the first line of a song or a suicide note.

The Hanslick Rebellion | “Dear Friends And Gentle Hearts” demo | May 31, 2010

Waiting for Reeves to get back from wherever he is so we can resume recording. This weekend’s objective: wrap up the Jeebus record, which was only waiting on Reeves’ guitars. There are three more songs to go.

Here’s a snippet from something we did the other night:

Jeebus | “If They Don’t Come Back” rough mix | May 22, 2010

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I tried sitting on my front stoop this morning and found it pleasant. I think it’s something I’d like to do more often. The weather up here has been surprisingly mild and warm since I moved in. I’ll just go ahead and assume this is because Albany is happy to have me back.

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Something I’ll be putting out in July: a compilation of tracks from last summer’s CELEBRATION PARTY! tour with Reeves, Mike Keaney and Matt Johnson. Each show from the tour is represented by at least one track, flowed together to make one juicy concert. The album is mastered and all set to go, but I want to hold it until after The Cutting Room Floor is out. You’ll be able to get CELEBRATION PARTY! as a digital download, optionally with a silkscreen poster from the tour signed and numbered by the band.

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Dunno if you’ve noticed, but I’m starting to add posts from my old blog, Honesty v. Politics, into the archives of this site – ’cause why the hell not? I’m not gonna do post more than one oldie at a time, and I’m not gonna repost everything, but in the end there will be more than enough.

This is what it sounds like when Reeves Gabrels (guitars), Anton Fig (drums, percussion), Graham Maby (bass), Ralph Carney (horns) and I (piano) vamp on “Babysitter”, a song from my in-progress album Small Sacrifices Must Be Made!

The thing that sounds like an organ solo is actually Reeves on guitar.

Jed Davis, Reeves Gabrels, Anton Fig, Graham Maby, Ralph Carney | “Babysitter” jam rough mix | May 15, 2010

The Cutting Room Floor:
- Jackets printed
- Stickers and inner sleeves in production
- Lacquers being cut
- Going live on iTunes imminently

“Yuppie Exodus From Dumbo” single:
- Cylinders being manufactured (one per day!)
- Available for pre-order. Check it out:

CELEBRATION PARTY! live album/silkscreen poster combo:
- Ready for mastering
- Silkscreens printed

The Hanslick Rebellion’s Ashamed Of Rock And Roll:
- Rehearsals begin on Thursday with Richard Lloyd producing
- Recording at the end of May

Albany:
- Finished shopping for furniture
- Moving the rest of my stuff up on May 8
- Cannot wait to get the fuck out of here

Mike is here and we just added his vocal and some bass to our demo of the new Rebellion track “Thanks For The Rope”. We think you’re gonna like it.

The Hanslick Rebellion | “Thanks For The Rope” demo | April 25, 2010

A sample from the first pass on this demo is here.