Jonah Smith: Dispatches

Video Blog 1

okay, it's probably not the most fascinating video ever, but you gotta start somewhere. as i'm still learning how to do things like post vids, i'm hoping that this will be good practice for when i'm on the road and want to do this quickly.

so, here is a vid with bits and pieces of a demo session i did over at aaron's house the other day. i had at one point set up the camera and tried to record us doing a pass on a song but it didn't record so all i ended up with is overdubs. but you can see how a demos session might go...chart writing and reviewing, overdubs and some laughs. also unfortunate is that i didn't get on tape teddy kumpel's music biz stories.

teddy has been a friend for a few years now and has done some gigs with me and has been mixing all my demos for awhile. he's kind of like a where's waldo in the music biz showing up as a background singer for nine inch nails on MTV or playing banjo with feist on good morning america. plus he plays guitar on many of the will ferrell movie soundtracks like talledega nights.

anyway, hope you enjoy it....

In need of assistance...

A named Justin on myspace sent me this message but unfortunately due to his privacy settings I have no way to respond. So, justin, if you read this please send me your contact info. thanks....js

 

Hey Jonah,

I wrote you an email about a month back asking if I would be able to use your song "Everything Is New" for a film that my college professor is putting together called "Day Lily". I never got a response for you about it, and I just want you to know that I honestly can't find a better song for the part and would really love to use the song... I do have all the paperwork to send over to you if you agree to do it. Please feel free to ask ANY questions.

Thanks!
Justin~

More Demo mixing today...

Today, I'm mixing a new batch of demos that I recorded last week with Aaron Comess, Ben Rubin and Teddy Kumpel over at Aaron's. Teddy is a great guitarist/musician and has been mixing my demos lately and it was great to have him on the session playing as well. I redid a song that I debuted at Highline Ballroom in December called, "Open Up the Door". I think the new version is way better....I'll post it here after it's mixed and maybe I'll post the old one as well so you guys can see how the song has developed. I guess that's one of the pitfalls of having a lot of time in between records. I mean, you get a lot of time to write but sometimes instead of just coming up with new stuff, you can get stuck rewriting songs that are already written (which are probably just fine the way they are). I also have another meeting with the Soundwave 360 people to see if there is a way that we can work together on the next record. This is the company that Tom Marshall is involved in and I'm pretty excited about the technology - what it does is pretty cool. I'm not going to talk too much about that though until something is firmer.

Both Sides Now

Yesterday was an interesting day. I spent the first half of the afternoon talking about music and the second half making music. Guess which half was more enjoyable.

The first part of my day included a long lunch with Steve B and Jon from Relix. I guess they are still thinking that they want to be in business with me even if they don't know exactly how.

I told them that I'm happy to hear any ideas they have (they didn't seem to have anything specific in mind) . Mostly just chit chat about things going on in both our worlds.

They also told me about this company with a new recording technology that was interested in investing in my new record...this was what Tom Marshall was telling me about at the Relix Holiday party ( I will hopefully have more to report on this soon)

I left the meeting which was in the flatiron district of the city and headed back to Brooklyn where i reconvened with my van and made my way over to my friend, Jon Solo's place. He called me up a couple of weeks back and said that he'd been working on demos over at his place and we should get together and play a little and see what happens. Sounded good to me. To be honest, I was really happy just for an opportunity to work on some music. I have a backlog of some songs that I haven't demoed yet, so i brought over a few ideas to his place.

He's basically got a similar situation at his place for making demos as me, (which is to say, very basic) but he's got a nicer Baldwin piano than I have (and in decent tune) and a nice Martin acoustic. He's a pianist by trade (he plays with Jamie Mcclean - formerly of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) but he plays a little bit of everything.

So we ended up just hanging out in his apartment and building up a track from scratch. He made a kick drum and snare sound by tapping on the body of the guitar. Then, I overdubbed the piano - which he had me double in a higher register (a cool new recording trick, i love those). Then he put down an acoustic track and a bass track. Then i sang the vocal and the harmonies. And then we filled out the percussion with a tamborine that i played like a hand drum and then i ended up putting a little harmonica on at the end.

All in all, considering we did it with one microphone in his apartment in a couple of hours, I think it sounds pretty good.  I'll do a little mix of it today or tomorrow and post it here. Let me know what you think...

Demo

hey all, i'm working on trying to figure out how to embed audio into the blog so here goes my first attempt. this is a demo of a song called "world without love" recorded at my place with andy on guitar and singing harmony. hope you like it.

Part II

scroll down for Pt 1....

Meanwhile, I was invited to the Relix Holiday Party. I felt pretty good about going because things seemed like they were finally sorted with the new record. It was early December and I ran into a lot of friends and acquaintances from the business. Tom Marshall, the lyricist from Phish was telling me about some new audio technology that he was involved in. I also ran into Pete Shapiro, who was telling me about his new 3D U2 Imax concert movie (which, by the way, I subsequently went to see and will save that for another blog, but it is AMAZING and you should try to see it if you can) and also an old friend Dennis Wygmans who is a music manager for artists like Shaggy and Billy Ocean (“…get out of my dreams….and into my car”) but many moons ago was the owner of Club Toast in Burlington, VT which was maybe the first legit music club to give me a gig oh so many years ago. All in all, I was having a pretty good time. I ran into Steve Bernstein, the owner of Relix, who always looks like he’s having a great time and then finally, I saw Jon Schwartz who is my A&R guy at Relix for lack of a better title, but basically my guy there. I told him about the deals I was getting at different studios and how I had booked the first session already. He looked at me kind of gravely and said “we’re not ready to do the record yet”.

Huh?!?

I said, “What do you mean. I thought we had things worked out. David already has his ticket over here. I’ve got everything lined up”

He obviously felt very uncomfortable and I don’t blame him. I think my eyes must have burned a hole to the back of his head. He said something like they needed more information about what was going to be recorded like track lengths and listings.

Again….Huh?!?

So things kind of deteriorated since then. I’ve learned not to confront Relix about stuff like this directly – it’s counter-productive. So then it was more waiting for Kevin to get together with Relix and find out what the deal is. They were slow to respond. Finally, a couple of weeks ago they sent him an email saying that they couldn’t spend the amount in the contract after all and we’d need to renegotiate some more. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to rethink my relationship with them.

To be honest, it’s hard to really be mad at someone who has really good intentions. I honestly care for all of the people at Relix. They were the first people to step up and take a chance on me. There were a million promises broken and million things done half-assed but in the end they still were the ones that helped me make the record I wanted to make. There will probably be many instances when I talk about things that happened between myself and Relix – some funny things and some not so funny things, but I hope to keep it in some sort of perspective with the good they also did for me.

Again, there is still a lot more to tell (recent past) before I'm caught up to the present. That is for a future posting, I guess...

Welcome!

Thank you for finding your way to this page. This is the first of many postings.

There is actually a lot to talk about.

I will also be posting new material here for you guys to check out and hopefully give me some feedback on. Also audio and video clips of rehearsals, concerts, traveling, writing.

Please if you haven't already, sign up to receive future notice of postings and feel free to get in touch...

First and foremost, many of you may be wondering where I’ve been and how come I’ve not been on the road and where is the new record? Well that’s a complicated answer but let me try to take a crack at it:

One thing I’ve learned about the music business is that you have to have patience. When I came off a long stretch of touring in October of last year I was really ready to jump into making a new record. I started writing a lot and collecting the songs that I’d written over the last couple of years and making demos….I had a lot of energy and was hoping to keep the ball rolling but for some reason my label seemed unsure of how or when to proceed with another record.

They often said things to me like, “This isn’t a sprint it’s a marathon” and “We’re in it for the long haul” which would leave one to believe that they wanted to make another record. Other things that they said also lead me to believe this. Things such as: “We can’t wait to do another record!”.

Well, finally, in December I had a meeting with them in their offices on 29th St. in Manhattan. They asked me if I was ready to make another record…Um yeah. They asked me what songs was I planning on recording. “Well”, I said, “I plan on recording the songs from the demos that I gave you and a few others that I haven’t recorded yet.”

“Great”, they said. But they had some concerns. They wanted to let me know that they could only commit financially to what was written in the contract. They went over budget on the last record and it’s promotion and they couldn’t do that again.

That seemed fair to me. I was okay with that. My manager, Kevin, was not entirely excited by that because he thought that it would take more money to set up the record than what was in the contract. Still, all in all, it seemed like things were moving forward. I asked them if they had a business plan for the record and they said they were working on one and would present it to me soon.

I was excited. I started calling around to studios and got some tentative openings. I booked the musicians and we decided with everybody’s schedule that we would try to start the record right before New Year’s. This is usually a big downtime for studios for obvious reasons and I was looking at getting some great deals for top-notch studios. I had a great engineer lined up as well – Tom Schick. I called my guitarist, David Soler, who lives in Barcelona and said, “It’s happening, get your ticket”.

....(sorry for the interuption, but  realizied that this is kind of a long story and I have to run at the moment so I guess I'll try to spread it over over a couple of blogs.)