At this moment...
Dec. 23, 2010
A day of baking... Includes gingerbread cookies, some sort of delicious German chocolate cake mix cookie creation and cardamom bread.
Dec. 19, 2010
Dec. 18, 2010
Dec. 15, 2010
Dec. 9, 2010
More tracking of Holy Man...
And a bit of video from the recording session.
Dec. 9, 2010
A little under 10 years ago my old band The Holiday Costume dissolved. Up until that point I had already been playing music with Matt, Jason and Dan for close to 10 years. During our freshman year of high school Matt and I formed the core of what would be known in the early days as Bermans & Arrival. The first song we ever learned was With or Without You by U2. At some point in time we picked up Dan on drums and Jason on guitar. We spent our high school years playing covers and writing some truly epic lost classics. We were grunge before grunge and total music misfits covering songs by Robyn Hitchcock, The Cure, U2, and R.E.M to name but a few.
Playing covers taught us how to write our own songs. We wanted to be an U2. And it showed in our songwriting. For a bunch of teenagers, we kind of had our act together, at least musically. And then we all went off to college. Bermans died.
Throughout college we continued to write songs on our own. When we returned home for breaks we would often get together and share our four-tracked recordings with one another. Eventually those recordings became the seeds for a new band, The Holiday Costume. At the time, Dan was living in Los Angeles, so Matt, Jason and I recruited a new drummer, Mark. We promptly started writing and recording new songs. Eventually Dan found his way back to Chicago and started playing guitar with us. It was a great line-up and we were writing some killer songs. No one individual was responsible for our sound, we were in it together to just write great music. And then, following what would be our final recording sessions, we imploded. Dan went off to fame in Kill Hannah, Matt retreated to the farthest of far southern suburbs of Chicago, and Mark, Jason and I formed what would become Zerostars.
I've always felt great pride in the songs we recorded as The Holiday Costume. Those songs deserved to be heard by a wider audience.
Then, last year there were rumblings of trying to put together a reunion show featuring the classic line-up of The Holiday Costume. E-mails were sent and amazingly Mark, Jason, Dan and I managed to get together to bash out a few of our old songs. But Matt was absent. Eventually Matt, Dan, Jason and I got together in the hinterland with our acoustic guitars and tried to hatch a plan to do a reunion show. Then nothing. Silence. Matt continued being a dad. Dan went on a tour of Europe with Kill Hannah. Zerostars played a sporadic show or two.
That all changed until recently. A few weeks back Dan hatched a plan to re-record some of the old songs written during The Holiday Costume years. We all agreed that it sounded like a crazy enough plan to work. Too busy with life to rehearse the songs, we got together for some drinks and dinner and put together a list of songs that we needed to record again because they deserved a second chance. It was a start. We even picked a date to begin recording with the multi-talented Garret Hammond.
This past Saturday we began recording Holy Man. We tracked bass, drums and guitar. I can't wait for more people to hear this re-recording. I've been listening to a very rough mix of what we recorded and I'm excited. Playing music with Matt, Dan and Jason (and Garret) again feels right. Here’s a glimpse of Garret tracking drums.
Dan listening to a playback of Holy Man.
Sara celebrated her birthday on Sunday. Following brunch with her parents we celebrated by heading to the Chicago Christkindlmarket and drinking spiced wine.
Sara didn't love the spiced wine, so I ended up drinking two miniature boots worth by myself.
From the iPhone...
I used two apps to process the photo. First, I shot it with my iPhone using the standard camera. Then, I used the tilt shift generator for the blur and followed it up with the Infinicam.
