LITTLE PLUM
Allen Broyles – piano
HEY, CALIFORNIA
me – acoustic guitar
I can sense now that things are beginning to pick up in the studio, which is good. This project has certainly been a straggler at times, through no one’s fault. Just timing and finances. But with drum tracks ready on everything we’re starting to pick up the bits and pieces that are lingering around.
Allen Broyles plays with the Josh Joplin Group. I’ve met him a couple of times before, and I’m pretty sure I’ve met him even earlier back when I used to hang out with Uncle Green (band, not a relative). I’d never heard him play before (all the time I’ve known Josh I’ve never seen him with his band) and he is amazing. Based on no previous listens and relatively vague instructions he nailed the part in about two hours. Particularly impressive given that, unlike, say, guitar, it’s a lot harder to re-record just a section of a piano track, if the playing is more or less non-stop.
But, especially impressive because the “vague instructions” basically consisted of me trying to describe the mood I wanted like this… “Okay, pretend you’re playing piano in some dank German beer-hall, pre WWII. After the set you’ll be heading upstairs with an underage hooker. Don’t worry about how it sounds, because you’ll be dead soon anyway from either syphillis or tuberculosis. Which you aren’t even aware of because you’re too strung out on absinthe. Oh, and just outside some punk kid named Hitler is about to start a riot.”
I think he got it, though.
I did the acoustic guitar for HEY, CALIFORNIA in one take, after 5 or 6 brief false starts because I couldn’t nail the tempo for some reason. I’d play about 5 seconds and stop, knowing I was slippping woefully off. One punch-in at the end, and then through to the end of the song. Did a quick scratch vocal and then we called it a night.