What a whirlwind. Starting with our rehearsal Sunday night and the past three days (Wednesday, Thursday and today), we've been turning 9 months of preproduction work into reality. It's been stressful, and as Murphy's Law would have it, I got sick and completely lost all the singing frequencies in my voice Wednesday. That day started, idiotically, with me taking my oldest to school, then going to a dentist appointment I'd made 6 months prior. I sat through the cleaning like a competitor in the Mommy Olympics, holding my 5-month-old baby on my stomach the whole time they cleaned my teeth. On the plus side, I have a feeling that made the hygienist work faster. From there, I took baby to my cousin-in-law to watch him. Every day I've been taking an early afternoon break to pick my older boy up from school and take him to be watched too.
I got to the studio and there was a bit of tension in that it had been so frustrating just to get to this point, having the cats together in one room, ready to play. But that feeling quickly dissipated as we recorded an amazing six tunes in one 11-hour stretch! I am a firm believer in deadlines, and being forced to commit rather than mull things over in your head for months or years on end. There's always the fear, however, that the result of meeting that deadline won't be brilliant--or simply better than your last effort. And I was joking last night that I might end up being the Stephen Hawking of music if my voice didn't come back: I could murmur into a computerized straw that would artificially convert my words into singing. But today I see the light; even though the cold is getting worse, it's at least starting to move out of my larynx. This was strange in that normally I lose my speaking voice but still have my singing voice above it. Emilio said it was all in my head. "No, dammit, it's in my throat!" I whispered back.
As always, there are surprises. One tune is standing way out ahead of the rest, with an amazing funk feel to it: My original, Goddess of War. There's simply no telling from the computer arrangement Wayne does what will jell at the live recording into something powerful or different or beautiful.
The musicians are the usual suspects: John Santos and Michael Spiro on percussion, Paul van Wageningen on drumset, Murray Low and Frank Martin on piano, Rick Vandivier on guitar, David Belove on bass, Wayne Wallace on bone, Melecio Magdaluyo on bari sax and flute, and Louis Fasman on trumpet and flugelhorn. In a week or so we'll be recording vocal parts--there are more harmonies, choirs and coros this time.
So now the onus is on me to actually sing this stuff well! It would have been nice to sing scratch vocals on everything, feeding off the energy of the musicians, but oh well. At least I got to hear their jokes. And hopefully their increased exposure to me has not yet revealed the drastic personality flaws I try so desperately to camouflage.
Or perhaps I just need lots of sleep.
