Day 1, The Making Of...

Okay, so here it is, Day 1 of, "the making of"! Of what you may ask? The making of my new record, cd, whatever you want to call it. Okay, so it's been taking forever to do this! But it's not like I haven't been trying. In the last 5 years, I've actually been writing, recording, meeting with people, doing gigs, working with producers, working with managers, agents, etc., trying to bring my dream to fruition. My problem: once I meet someone who says they are going to help, I believe them. I know, what a concept, right? The problem is I give them too much time to come through. I've given 5 people, in the last 5 years, a year each which was waaaaay too long to do what they said they would do which amounted to not much. So, I made a conscious decision to stop WAITING AND GET THE JOB DONE. sorry, I don't mean to yell; I'm just pointing out how adamant I am about taking things into my own hands. It's not that all of the people had bad intentions; some of them meant well but were just not capable of doing what they said they would do. Others were, well, not so well-intentioned. I have a tendency to give my power away too easily. So, now that I realized that, guess what? I'm stopping that behaviour and taking control of the situation.
The first thing I've done is obviously made the decision to do something. I decided I needed a producer to help me achieve this goal. If you're not familiar with what a producer does, he/she helps you arrange the songs, can put a band together for you, uses all their connections to find the best studio for the way you want your music to sound. A good producer will bring out the best in the artist, not just massage their own ego. they will enhance the artist and make it better than you could have imagined or just as great as it sounds in your wildest dreams. Last year, I put a very cool band together. I was doing my best to get us into a studio with this great producer named John Porter. John has worked with some of the best bands around including producing, in my opinion, the best songs the Smith's had ever done AND produced the breakout album for Los Lonely Boys last year, plus tons of other acclaimed records. John and I go way back to my days with Eric Clapton. John plays guitar and at that time he was in Ronnie Lane's band [of the Small Faces]. We did a fun little tour in the South of France with Ronnie Lane and his band and went on to Majorca, Minorca, Barcelona, and then finally went on to St. Tropez. It lasted 2 weeks, we sailed around on the Meditteranean and did 2 gigs. I remember busking with John and a few other of his bandmates on the beach in St. Tropez. We made a few bucks too which was good fun. I've crossed paths with John through the years and last year he called me to do some backing vocals on a project he was working on. I could go on and on but I'll stop there.
As I was saying, I was trying to get the band I put together in a studio last December with John producing. But he got a call to do some production for one of the Eagles, Joe Walsh, and I had to put our plans on hold. It was disappointing, but I understood. So, I hadn't talked to him for quite some time and decided to try contacting him again a few weeks ago and brought up again, that I'd love to work with him on my own recording. He said he'd love to so we made a plan to get together.
He came over to my house today and I played him several new songs I'd just written to add to the other songs I had sent him copies of late last year. He really liked the songs and requested that I send him some mp3's of them which I did this afternoon. We also discussed my getting hold of the same rhythm section I used in that rehearsal last year. I put the rehearsal up on youtube: www.youtube.com/marcelladetroit. There are several songs with "the gadson band", with the great, legendary James Gadson on drums and Reggie McBride on Bass. James has played with so many great artists like Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, Paul McCartney, and Reggie has also played on a host of great records with Keb Mo' and Taj Mahal. They are both incredibly funky, yet they understand modern music as well. So, I contacted James and Reggie today and already heard back from Reggie who is available in early September. Just waiting to hear back from Gadson now. Once I hear back and check their avails, I will let John know. He knows of some great studios in the Los Angeles area. We're looking to do the recording in September sometime. The plan now is for me to only do 4 songs. That was my idea. It makes things a bit easier to concentrate on a smaller number of songs rather than a whole album. I want to focus on that, and then put it out there. It seems most artists these days are doing singles or smaller amounts of songs for many reasons. The music biz has changed a lot, in some ways, for the better.
I'll be writing about this every day now until it happens and then while it's happening, and after it's happened too. The recording is the fun part. After that, the work begins. But the good news is, there are options and there is interest.

Until tomorrow.

With Love;

Marcy