Determined to stay in bed after yesterday’s trip to the Canadian border, I went to bed straight after Doug and Liz dropped us off from the golden Chevrolet. A later start at midday helped the schedule but I still felt like as much post-gig sleep was prudent. It seems a show takes away the invisible strings that hold you up throughout the day, that’s why being on tour is the last place you would want to be leading an unhealthy lifestyle despite the near impossibility of finding healthy choices. Clicking out of gig mode into studio mode and vice versa is quite a trick and you simply can’t imagine you were just doing one when you were doing the other a few hours before.

Although Fred has gone we were working on Fred’s project today with Paul in playing the piano, all good until we were faced with 432! Paul and drummer/engineer John and engineer Kevin set about trying to figure out how to record a piano onto this track. We had the Nord keyboard and after much mathematical tinkering discovered that the Nord would not allow such shenanigans. Sarah took Paul to his house to pick up his keyboard because he thought he might be able to talk it into 432. He was right. Only one of the two songs was in 432 so we had a real piano on one at least.

After the piano, it was time for Olivia to start adding violin to the Fred songs and we managed one and a half, the first we finished, the second a work in progress that we will continue with tomorrow. We have Rich coming in to play organ tomorrow anyway, so we will work on Fred’s project until we have the second violin song done too. After that, we will continue with the mystery project.

It was another lovely day today, warm in the sun, the sky a dazzling bright blue, completely cloudless with a slight chill in the shade that turned into a skin-biting night.

Locked away in the studio we don’t seem to notice when the sun dips behind the horizon and nightfall is upon us. We enter the studio in daylight and leave with the bats. It’s a musician’s lot to lose track of time, of days, of the months, and the years. Next, you wake up to realise that later that year you will be 65, the last time you looked you were 35.

Music today has been the other album we discussed at Pam and Bill’s, Nilsson Schmilsson (1971). It came up during the gig after a conversation about Ham and Evans‘ Without You during the gig and Pam pointed to the record shelf behind us and told us the album was there. Bill played it after the show. A great, great singer, I’m not sure if Harry Nilsson is on anyone’s radar anymore but he is certainly on mine. He sadly died in 1994 aged just 52.

Music Of The Daze