The album and the Premiere of Love is A War is not until Nov. 8th Cause I thought we needed another choice for Election day ;) But because my wider audience has not yet caught onto my steemit profile. I wanted to drop it here and talk about the making of this beast of an album. I also feel like I can bitch a little more on steemit whereas, it doesn't go over to well on facebook.
Live From The Deep: An Experiment In Chaos
Preview of Peace On The Morning
My creative process is considered quite odd when I work with other artist or music professionals. Over a career in music I have not only learned to love 'happy-accedents,' I actually pursue them. When in about my 10th year of hitting music life hard both in performance and recording, I looked back and saw that all that I treasured from those years, and I mean ALL, were originally considered mistakes, accidents, a rabbit out of the hat production. This carried across both recorded songs and live events. It seemed that what I actually was looking for was not perfection, I have plenty of those type projects, it was surprise. I myself was wanting to be surprised by my music. There had to be a method to live inside that space, of always being surprised, not knowing what the outcome would be. That's a hard task in these digital days because it is so damn easy to make things perfect. And as someone who cares a lot about performance and musicality, in the beginning, it was just too tempting to edit the life right out of my productions. I did the same with live productions, where we knew every song so well that in the actual performance there was no doubt that we all were bored out of our mind. There was no room for surprise, it was all mapped out and tied down.
Sometimes happy accidents are just accidents... no happy
This live album was not meant to be that big of a deal. The original idea was to highlight a certain song that an Advisor wanted to hold back from the public... but I didn't so we compromised and decided to do a live release with the song. Originally it was just supposed to be five songs, no big deal right. Well.. I don't DO 'no big deal'... I wish i could, but I seem to make everything a big deal, and push it at least fifty steps out of reach. I like the excitement of not knowing how it's gonna work.
The big deal
The 4-5 song EP overnight turned into a grand vision. I had been to a few live venue studios (studios set up to also host a live event) which would have given us a pristine pretty little EP pretty easily. But no.. during my studio/venue search I found this little place called ______ (I'm leaving it blank I'll tell you later) which was actually a studio/venue located in the building of the first club I ever walked into when I was a wee 15 year old... My memory is it was the actual first bar I played at (that may or may not be true because I'd had a lot to drink since then) The sign to the old brick venue was still intact, called 'The Rock.' This is also a place that David Koresh used to play at.. (another story... and I'll amend that in a second too). The place was a hole in the wall studio now, the engineer was actually living there when I walked in. Everything in me, and all my music partners said NO! don't do it... this place is ANALOG with no digital, which means no way to fix things.. it was shady, the guy was shady and it made perfect sense NOT to book my very expensive live event there. So I booked it there.
(p.s. So after telling everyone it was the first club I walked in, I realized that maybe it wasn't. The club was called On The Rocks, and that is also where Koresh played. But at the time and all the way up to the promotional materials, I still believed it was the first venue. It was, though, one of the first.. I just can't remeber it all.
(a few weeks after the show we video'd one of the songs in a Downtown Dallas Office building... minus a few band members.)
And it got bigger and bigger
I had been working on an album that I just couldn't finish because the funds and the right people were not in place yet. it was called 'Love One Another,' and was written with all group/crowd sung songs. The idea was to have a group of artist live at my studio/house, film it like a commune and record these songs in a very live-ish creative mode. I latched on the Live concert as a vehicle to at least try some of these songs out. The rest of the songs would extend back to my early days, and we made it kinda a retrospective to celebrate an album planned by the same title. Ezra Vancil - A Retrospective.
4 months to go
So the idea was hatched, now to make things incredibly more difficult, I let my band go. I wanted a new band for this event. What I had going wasn't working for this.. not that any one player was a problem, but bands have a spirit to them. I needed a new spirit. To do this with a five piece band and a new set of songs and a few months to work them up is not super hard, so I added in a string quartet and about 8 singers as the congregation of voices and a camera crew to shoot it and ensured that this was going to rock my nervous system.
things fall apart the center can not hold
We had tons of issues with our confidence in the venue building up to the show, out of respect, I'm not going to say anything, though. And that's fine because there was much else going wrong that I can highlight.
In the end, we had 14 people on stage. During one take, LIVE, ANALOG TAPE recording. With no baffles, nothing to keep the main speakers out of the recording, and no budget for a re-do. Things got complicated. First of all... I really didn't have clear ideas of what the singers would be doing on sevral songs that were added in... So parts were written on the fly as happy accidents.
As a part of this show there were planned several duets with a girl I'd been working with from the Bob Wills Family, Leslie Wills (you can see a video here: The Wills Sessions). As we were about 1 month out, I get a call she was in a horrible car wreck. Thank God she was Okay, but in no condition to do this. So I hire another red-head girl with a beautiful voice from Austin... In the end, I also had to cancel her, the stress of pulling 14 people, a camera crew, a venue that was getting shaky and food, and t-shirt designs, and tickets on and on... I finally made the call to drop the red heads and the strings and just go with the congregation and my bass player, Lori, singing the duet parts, though I was worried about her having so much on her plate.
---preimere of LOVE IS A WAR Below---
The Show
I'm realizing now that this story goes on for another 9 months. The Show was January 17th, 2016. We'll stop there although some of the worst and difficult barriers happened after the show when we realized the recording was full of noise. Lots of noise. I eventually figured out how to preserve it, but once again that's another story.
The night before was a dress rehearsal. People of the 14 men/woman band were still learning parts. We realized we needed a third camera because of the blockade around Aaron our drummer, so called in a pro. I had decided to quit smoking the night before.. don't ask me why. So, the dress rehearsal night, I was like pissed at the world. I was dark. And here I was about to do this show that is really centered around love and community and I couldn't even stand to be in public. We finished rehearsal and I had to go meet a music manager that had flown down from New York, to see the recorded event. On the way there I was so angry and disrupted. From what I had just seen at rehearsal this show was going to suck so bad, but it wouldn't matter because I wasn't real sure the studio was going to pull off the recording. I'd already sunk my whole winter's cash into this thing.
I called a friend in the band, who is also like a mentor.. he talked be down from the building and I just gave up. it was going to be whatever it was going to be.
The Big Night
I walk in the venue, it's starting to fill up with the audience. The first thing I hear is the camera guy hasn't shown up. (that was the pro we hired) .. I let it slide off.. so there would be only two angles, that's fine. I went back in a completely black hallway behind the venue and waited for the call. I didn't want to talk with anyone worried more about my mood. I didn't know if all the technical details had been fixed, I didn't know if the camera people were set, or that the band knew all the parts. The reason it was such a big deal, is because I had blown everything on this album. Everything. I didn't even have money to eat with the band afterward. And, I was sure I had made some bad choices, especially with the studio/venue.. they obviously were about ten leagues behind the level I like to work in. But I had to just let all that go. If anything, I had all my best fans in one room. A bunch of musicians I adore, camera people who are just the coolest in the world. And my son and daughter were there, which was the first time they had seen me with a big band. I had been doing smaller acoustic things over the years. I said a little prayer with the band and we headed out.
When I stepped on stage, I looked out on the audience and felt a peace like I have not felt in many years. The night turned out being just magical.. people walked out saying, what the hell just happened in there. Now, I'm not sure that magically made it to tape... I know it's not the quality I would have hoped for. Along with the pro cameraman not showing, our other camera girl, bless her heart, got the wrong message and thought she was supposed to take photos.. so we ended up with just one camera on a tripod the whole night. I pieced together other footage shot that night to pull the videos togather into something watchable.
Pulling the album out my arse
When I got the tapes back... I decided not to release it. It just was so far from what I had hoped for. And because of the way we recorded it, there was little to do about it. I recorded it that way on purpose, though, as I said at the beginning .. I was trying to force the muse to act. Trying to surprise myself and all of us. Hoping that the sheer passion of that room would somehow break through all the technical barriers and be undeniable. I was eventually convinced to just finish it in the mix and release the damn thing as the full night.
Time will tell. on to the next album.
Here is a world premiere to you Steemers alone. Wide release on Nov. 8th.
Preimere of LOVE IS A WAR for #steemit only
Love Is A War Special Patreon Pre-Release from ezra vancil (official) on Vimeo.
Ezra Vancil & the Congregation - Live From The Deep
Now on Pre-Sale at bandcamp >>
I'm Ezra Vancil an Americana artist From Texas.
follow me on Steemit @ezravan
All images hosted on ezravancil.com owned by B5 Records