Web guru

This post is dedicated to my web guru, as he’s always helping me out online for my website. Le grand Serge, you rock my web!

Paper cup

This is the opening track of the album Perspectives. (Listen here)
It’s funny because when I composed it, I was ready to throw it away, thinking “it’s too obvious, too simple”… And when I previewed the album for some friends, everybody asked me why the other songs are not as cool as this one. Anyway.

What is it all about? I would say that these 2 sentences in the lyrics sum it up: “Watching the constellation we would unconsciously choose. Sometimes a dream makes your feet holding on the ground”.
I’m pretty sure.

This is the first song we recorded in the studio with Sacha. First day, a morning in summer, July. I recorded my guitar/pilot vocal tracks and them we added stuff. Sacha recorded the kick and snare, I played tambourine. Then I don’t remember in which order we did it, but Sacha laid some electric/acoustic/dobro guitars (I did some acoustic as well), bass and I played my “laptop garage band” hammond organ and some Rhodes. Then the vocals.

what is being rock’n'roll?

what it is being rock’n'roll in 2009? Do what you dream of, allowing yourself to do it the way you’re able to do it. It’s doing his best, knowing his limits but doing the best with what we got/are.
It’s just a proposal, not a firm definition.

Is posing/dressing/smoking/drinking way to much/being provocative without having anything to say/pretending to be cool/being in art school etc rock’n'roll? Well maybe it looks like it, but deeper in the meaning it just looks like… well something like immaturity or anything lighter maybe. no offense, just thinking out loud.

Nada Surf, Lucky

Nada Surf’s current album is called Lucky. They took time to write a pretty long text on their liner notes about it. I love what they wrote, so I thought I’d share it with you:

“From a zillion angles we are lucky, we should remember that we are, we need to be reminded that we are. If we forget, we have to be reminded again. The band is lucky. We’re lucky to have each other. And off the record, we’ve all had some really rotten luck over the last few years, and still have to manage to get up in the morning and feel good. Not easy. But if you remember how lucky you are to have what you have… And seriously, it is starting to feel like the world is really about to fall apart, so it also feels dark.”

I totally fell in love with this song: see these bones (click on it to listen). Matthew Caws wrote it after visiting the catacombs in Rome.

Track order

Track list… Looking for the right order for my record. I’m not sure, but it seems that I’ve found the “right” order. Do you also have this impression when you make for ex. mixtapes: there’s no objective rule but you know that in a certain order it works. Like it has to be like that, but you don’t really know why.

Record

Cool cool cool I’ve just received the (nearly final) mastering of my record. I can’t wait to send it to the cd factory. I’ve been waiting for so long. I can’t wait to have the record in my hands, we’ve been working so much on it. When we have the physical cd I’ll probably have the feeling that the record is “really born”, if that makes any sense to you.

acoustic guitar

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acoustic

Festival ticket rush and prices

Just wondering why people madly rush for music festival tickets these days. 110.000 tickets/130.000 have been sold in 45 min for a festival I often go to. 45 minutes! And moreover tickets get more expensive year after year and most of the time the prices are just highly indecent. Well I’m not gonna pay 150$ to see Leonard Cohen… Festival tickets for less than 100$ become the exception… God where do people find their budget to go to festivals all along summer?

premiere

On saturday I’ll play live with my new project, it’s going to be the first time I’ll play most of these songs in concert and the first time I’ll play them with a whole live band. So I’m really excited and nervous as well. (Of course) we did a middle-average-maybe-bad rehearsal on tuesday but we still have one tonight. But as one says: bad last rehearsal means good gig. Well maybe it’s psychological: if you play really bad on the last rehearsal, you’re 200% concentrated during the gig because you know you can f*** up the song real bad, so you’ve got this strength to survive… By playing really bad, I mean you know the songs because you played them a million times but can’t help being bad.
Anyway we’ll be 6 on stage, not necessarily everyone at the same time: electric guitar, drums, bass, acoustic guitar, keyboards, discrete laptop, alto saxophone for one song…
I can’t wait to be on saturday, because I haven’t played live for a long time, recording and recording again in my own intimate little world… We still have a general rehearsal tonight, so that’s nice. Maybe that’s going to make me cool down a little bit.

Lomography and photography

Time to shoot again! Nice light, nature waking up, every spring makes me going out with my cameras… Not that I don’t shoot regularly, but as I’m shooting partly with lomography’s lca and holga and they need a lot of light for good results, spring’s the time.

The digital vs analog photography war is most of the time really funny to me. Of course digital is user-friendly, easy to handle, cheaper to reveal because there’s no film process. But: I can tell the difference between a digital and an analog picture just by watching it a few seconds. I’ve made a blindtest and I had 10/10. Not that my eye is particularly good, but there’s a real difference. Digital still is cold to me and not yet at the top of what it could be. Analog is warm, organic and there’s this grain that you can’t find in any expensive digital camera. And I don’t feel like spending a whole lot of time behind my computer screen for post-production and analog imitating.

One day analog photography will just be history and then I’ll have to buy a digital camera… For now I think that digital photography still has to get better. When digital is really competing with analog, then maybe I’ll buy a digital cam… Though I love my Nikon F90, lca, holga (this amazing medium format cam made entirely of plastic) and so on.

Here’s a bunch of photographs I’ve taken on the highway a few weeks ago, around 6.30 pm…

Shine a light

I’ve just seen “Shine a light” yesterday. Whether you like the Rolling Stones or not, if you like rock music it’s a nice experience. Beautifully shot, edited and most of all mixed: like when a cam’s getting close from a musician, the sound of him increases. I think it’s one of the coolest thing about the movie.

I think it has what I’d call the rock’n'roll soul all along: this thing that you feel about rock creating deep emotions, this thing that made me want to make rock music in the first place I guess. When you feel music from your chest flowing all around your body… Well that’s it for the limbic explanation, at least for today

And cool end by the way, maybe the only cgi manipulation in the movie that we’re aware of.

Living well

“Living well is the best revenge”
This quote from a middle age philosopher has been borrowed by R.E.M. as a song title. I wish I had discovered it before, as it would be a great album title… And I’m quietly thinking about a title for my album…