Daniel Pinchbeck speaking at “The Ayahuasca Monologues”

Thank you, Funny Or Die for being so…. Funny.

Great review for David Myhr in R2.

butchwalker:

Do you like the vocal stylings of Daryl Hall? Do you like paella? How about some red wine? Oh… I forgot.. Do you like to jam? If your name is Butch Walker, then HELL YES. sign me up for that. You can catch me doing the entire list of those things with Daryl on an episode of Live From Daryl’s House at http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com/

Eat your heart out, cheerleader girlfriend in elementary school that broke up with me after she gave me her vinyl single of “Kiss On My List”….

UTRECHT, 5/6

This gig took place in a little farm, which is grandfathered in, surrounded by busy freeways. Just a little parcel, with an old house a couple of small barns, a tiny paddock with two horses, some goats, chickens. Mostly the house is used for small performances. In this case, we set up in the barn that adjoins the house. It looked completely ramshackle, me having to slip between loose boards to get into the space, unraveling my cables on the old concrete floor. Took a long time to set up. The show was essentially a birthday party for a friend of Sonja van Hamel’s, and thus she was hired to play. About ten minutes before we were supposed to start, in the middle of the afternoon, I was pretty sure no one was there, but exited the barn and was surprised to find thirty or so people about, including a couple of folks I knew, milling around in the mews, having coffee and cake. And turning around to head back into the barn, the visual set up of the show and the Drawclips machinery was really nice looking. Reminds me of the footage of Neil Young and co recording “Harvest” that you can see in the Archives box set. More barn! This show also sounded very good, we weren’t loud at all, and barely amplified by the minimal PA, just reinforced subtly. Very enjoyable this show was, I think my favorite of the handful of shows I played with Sonja this spring.

Packed up and they dropped me and all my crap at the train station back in Amsterdam, and rode back down to Paris. This was the day of Francois Hollande’s presidential election victory, and the celebration was taking place in Bastille not far from where I live. Mayhem. I was tired from the shows and just wanted to go home, even tho it was kind of exciting I have some feelings of…well, you know the Chinese tale. Boy gets a horse and everyone says how great that is. “We’ll see” says the wise man. Boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg and everyone says how awful that is. “We’ll see” says the wise man. War breaks out but because his leg his broken the boy misses the battle he would have otherwise died in because it went badly. Everyone says, how great. “We’ll see” says the wise man. And so on. I admit that Sarkozy’s government reduction plan was not working to stimulate the moribund French economy. But I don’t know if Hollande’s party’s ways are what’s best for France either. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, crowds have taken over, cars honking, and by my house it was especially intense. People dancing in the streets, screaming, jumping, whatever…a big release. Yikes, I got home and we were all so tired we slept thru the rest. I don’t mind crowds, but, again, I had a weird sense of foreboding. Haven’t shaken it.

The next day was my last at home for awhile, I had a lot to do, finishing up mixes for Alpha Ray, Lewis Phillips, and so on. Had a bottle of wine to share with Dom and finally a big cuddle. There was no school on the day I left, VE Day. Headed to the airport not too early. Flight: canceled. Alright. I was booked first class, and I stayed that way, just took longer to get there. On to DC, then Houston, finally getting into Seattle at almost midnite. Missed the last shuttle to Bellingham so I had, on the Houston layover, booked myself a hotel by the airport.

When I got there I fired up my laptop as someone needed a file from me, but my hard drive, with all my traveling sessions on it, wouldn’t mount. Reset the Firewire bus, reset the PRAM. No avail.

Few hours later I was up and on the shuttle to Bellingham, so early that I was in town by 8.30. My folks came to pick me up. A cafe, a drive out to the marina, and it’s there we find the Apple reseller. Found out there was nothing wrong with my computer or my drive, it mounted fine now, but I bought a drive for backup just in case.

Fetched the upright bass I was borrowing from my son’s mom’s husband Dave. Yep. They left it sitting outside in the driveway–it was a nice day and they said you can do that sort of thing where they live, outside of town. Sold some CDs and DvDs. Hit a pharmacy. Did some printing at my mom’s office. Practiced some bass, took my folks out to dinner, or rather, they took me, and by 9 I was out.

Up at 2.45 that morning. Worked a bit, slept more.

BELLINGHAM, 5/10

impromptu acoustic Posies set in a church, for charity, in Bellingham. After the performance I was having a coffee in a bar with Jon and my first bandmate Chip, who does recording engineering etc in Bellingham. Looked out the window to see a huge doe ambling down the street.

KIRKLAND, 5/11

Another impromptu charity concert in a small hall in Kirkland. A girl baked two sheets of cookies frosted with various Posies themes. Earlier during the day I was still in Bellingham, had a big lunch of crab with my folks and my aunt and uncle. I spent the morning just looking out on the lake, observing a loon, when it was attacked from below the water, torpedo style, by another loon, two males fighting over territory. I was very lucky to witness the ritual–they danced on the water, flapping wings and snaking necks at each other, and squawked in a way that you don’t hear loons usually do. As a boat approached, with a waterskiier behind, the defeated loon gave the customary loon whistle–no matter the previous combat, he went back to warning the species at a hold–the common, global enemy was more of a threat than the temporary one.

Later in the day, as we dined on the deck, we were buzzed by hummingbirds, and powder blue butterflies who settled on me now and then. A family of Canada geese approached the house to feed on our lawn, two adults and three goslings, then promptly disappeared. Ah…I see why. A massive bald eagle was soon patrolling the area and it’s likely the reason this family had three goslings and not the customary four.

You can imagine I was sad to go–drinking wine in brilliant sunshine, with my family, nature all around. Long drive to Kirkland, I passed out. Jon was kind enough to listen to my album and actually gave a few compliments. Always hard to play stuff for your bandmates. Yep, I was passing out on the way home from there too.

Saturday I worked in the studio with Scott Gagner from San Francisco, really nice fellow and great musician. I was expecting to do a ton of overdubs of different kinds but he seemed most keen on getting backing vocals out of me, so we did quite a few. Found out my favorite burger joint in North America, the Red Mill, has taken over the Totem House on the Ballard locks, so very near the studio, this is a great development. We went there for lunch, and ran into Rob Morgan, who can easily work in more stories, jokes and anecdotes per square inch than anyone I know.

Sunday I didn’t even bother to pick up a NY Times. I recorded drums for the Eric Lichter album. Tho Eric is a drummer (and so is Scott Gagner, and so is Michael Collins with whom I recorded this week–and none of them play drums on their respective albums!) we had a fellow named Mike come in, who played in bands like the Moving Parts (and in a band called the Pudz with Rob Morgan). This was a long, challenging day. The studio I work out of is small and not really set up for drums. We set them up in the control room, working with headphones. There’s not a ton of gear to work with for such a big set up, but we did it. We were doing preproduction there too, really–coming up with arrangements for each song on the fly.

Monday I worked with Michael Collins on the album by his band Victory Lap. Work on this album started a decade ago (not with me), got sidetracked, and now are heading to completion at last. Spent the day doing various overdubs–organ, guitar, vocals, percussion.

Today I worked from my accommodations, as always my friend Brian’s house, now he has a room in the basement I can use while I visit as a kind of recording and mixing suite. So did some more overdubs on Michael’s stuff and then got started on a mix. We checked out Jones BBQ and dined with Brian and also Ian Moore.

Seattle is seductively sunny. When Michael and I were in Ballard at the studio, we parked on the next street parallel to the one the studio is on, even tho the surrounding blocks have big businesses this block has a row of tiny houses, apparently condemned. Gnarly looking dudes were taking the appliances out, and loading them into a pickup using unprintable language as their main force of leverage. The younger of the two was a long hair, the older was just the kind of guy that beats your teeth in outside a bar for brushing by him on your way to the bathroom. Short hair, ripped up rock T shirt, disturbingly tight shorts. And even more weird, we noticed he was wearing, like, little booties, almost like Uggs. To demo a house and lift super heavy shit! Ballard is still weird. They moved the Radio Shack off Market Street tho. Still shows up in every Google Map, iPhone map, etc. Hate that.

Love Sleeping. Headed that way

Love
KS
Seattle

Do you like the vocal stylings of Daryl Hall? Do you like paella? How about some red wine? Oh… I forgot.. Do you like to jam? If your name is Butch Walker, then HELL YES. sign me up for that. You can catch me doing the entire list of those things with Daryl on an episode of Live From Daryl’s House at http://www.livefromdarylshouse.com/

Eat your heart out, cheerleader girlfriend in elementary school that broke up with me after she gave me her vinyl single of “Kiss On My List”….

Vote Pugwash!

Pugwash & Neil Hannon doing stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoCxXs9FTQ