shawn avery

i'm very tired lately. humidity, heat, protools editing. that'll do it. houston's latest round of recording went well... interesting developments on the track "lonely broom." i've realized that we as a band have a fetish for "song outros" that are nearly as long as the actual song. on the outro for "lonely broom" i had an idea for a background vocal and i seem to have gotten carried away. ...i recorded 25 or so dense background harmonies on the fadeout. phil spector would be proud. i'm not entriely sure that the idea works, but it is very musical - which is important. getting ready to pack for florida. " tomorrow we return to the town of my birth, i want to be ready ."

i played a show last night at zydeco here in bham with jesse payne. he noted that the line-up for last night was a local supergroup of sorts: being described to the audience as brian sunderman of the influence, shawn avery of the ashes, and chase laplattnier of gainer. ... i then added that jesse was of the brinks. cordova opened once again, and i used their bass rig. the weather was incredibly humid and the backstage area was sweaty. no mirror... the beer got warm too fast. but there was one cool development during the preshow... elvis showed up in a pick-up. i have the photo to prove it. i'll try to post it this weekend. the show itself was fast and furious. chase, the drummer is all about modern punk. think, dave grohl. intense to follow. good shit though. the stage lights were waaay too hot. i had trouble focusing and because of the heat and my overall energy level, i felt self-conscious during the set. the women of long story short + their friend zack came out and natalie had ...

friday... watched loretta lynn with my mom. sat up on the ludacris stage-thanks chrysla. saturday... ashby and i got up early and recorded his mother's vintage grand piano from late morning until about 7pm. saturday night... quick stop at surin, back to city stages to see def leppard... the crowd was too big... hung our for a few hours in the vip lounge. ran into some friends... talked with jeff/instant karma about the future. it's looking good. sunday... up early again... recorded for a few more hours on the piano. we managed to replace all the old piano parts and created news ones... about 8 or 9 songs in about 10 hours. went back to city stages to see rachael yamagata... i was more than a little impressed... and smitten... and then the black crowes. the group this time around consisted of myself, ashby, christine, natalie, stacey and their brother john. less people. good weather all night...

i think is has rained 12 out of the last 13 days. i mentioned to ashby's dad that we should start building an arc and gathering up animals or something... he reminded me that when god throws a temper tantrum again, it will be with fire... so then i was like, "well shit, what are we gonna do?" this weekend i began moving some gear over to ashby's house where we are gonna try to finish the guitars and basses. we still have some tracks to transfer from the studio, but that shouldn't take too long. ashby went to the beach this weekend, so i hung out over there to watch the fort, and to set up all this stuff. i can't say for sure, but i'm thinking the follow up to our debut album will be mainly comprised of a lute and a tamborine. friday night i hung out with my buddy sarah and she "re-turned me on" to the genius that was "blazing saddles." we were both really a.d.d. all evening. she loaned me some toothpaste, because i forgot to bring mine ...

i just mentioned this to ashby... there have been a few times in my life when i have been completely in love with a song that i am working on... in this case... a song we are working on. the first time i felt this way about a song was about ten years ago this month. the song i'm talking about at the moment is one of the greatest songs i've ever been a part of. if we had released the album as originally planned say in dec '04 or may '05, this song would not have made it. it came along quietly toward the end of last year... then early in the spring, i noticed we had a gem in the rough... i have a feeling that this will be one of our defining songs, whatever that means... .hwy. as i mentioned in the last entry, we had some technical/compatability issues on thursday night... i went back to the studio about 5:30 on friday and by the time i got there, jeff had already transfered a song to our firewire drive. jeff really doesn't like to fail. i've noticed this. he is t...

from 7:15pm until after midnite last night, we tried in vain to get our 20+gigs of audio sessions to transfer from the recording system at instant karma studios, to our firewire drives. the idea was to transfer out all of the drum tracks so that we could do some interesting stuff at our home studio... then transfer everything back into the nuendo system later in the summer when we are ready to do final vocals and mix... so far we are 0-1. it took a while to get the network up and running, and this was after spending a lot of time trying to get the mac formatted firewire drive to get noticed by the hotst/studio computer. after finally getting the network up and running, we realized the router is whacked... so we then set up a direct connection only to find out that we need a crossover cable. houston came out to the studio (hoping) to get rough mixes of the backing tracks so that he can work out some final guitar parts. josh cooper also stopped by for a while... it was good to hang out w...

i got contacted via myspace by an old friend from a former life. apparently he and his friends had been trying to find me for years. yet another reason myspace.com is the greatest portal in the history of man. or something. i was obviously shocked to hear from them. all of the angst of that era came rushing back. that was truly an evil evil evil experience - living in phoenix. truly the twighlight zone. so now i'm in contact with all of them, they are all beautiful and successful and happy and mature and creative. it is great to see younger people doing something useful with their lives - i.e. creative. this evening, we are going back into the studio to gather the tracks and take them home with us. we are gonna make them soup and set up a cozy room for them to sleep in. then we will have our way with them several times a week. when we are done with them, they will be all grown up, and by the fall - hopefully they will be gone. " the more i stay in here... the more i disappear ...

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