Jess Klein – Backstage

A friend sent me a link to this new Springsteen song from his album coming out next week (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99173117&ps=bb3)

Had an incredible birthday this week.  We were working in the studio when I glanced out the back window and saw my friend Charlie Faye, who is currently on crutches due to a sprained ankle, trying to navigate the dog poop (Mark, one of my producers, whose farmhouse the studio is in, has 4 dogs!), and my other friend David Holmes, who is not on crutches, but was carrying a blue pinata!

Suddenly there were six more people in the studio and a the pinata, which I discovered, after they rigged it up and handed me a blunt intrument, was filled with apples!  (This might not be everyone’s ideal birthday gift, but I can’t eat candy, so I was pretty touched).  Following that mayhem, we all rolled down to Flipnotics and played a crazy show where there were cell phone signals coming through the speakers and all sorts of technical tomfoolery.  I wouldn’t have had it any other way.  It ended with my band and producers singing happy birthday.  I just feel so blessed.  Below, me, and the decapitated pinata, which Scrappy (producer/guitar player) suggested I put on a post on my front lawn as a warning to all the other blue bears.

Once I'd wacked the crap out of it

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In the studio. Matt the Electrician just came in to share his brass stylings with us. He has brass instruments of all sizes, like some old-time peddler of wares he kept pulling out cases of different sizes and shapes. It’s a warm day for January 3, 2009, about 80 degrees. Peanut the studio cat is using the opportunity to nap per usual. There is now a horn section on my song When the Time Comes. It sounds like Louisiana just walked into the room when that moment in the song comes. There’s a warm breeze blowing through the control room out here in the countryside 15 minutes south of town. Freedy Johnston just moved to Austin. He lives out here by the studio so we get the benefit of his presence. I landed in the right place.
Here’s a shot of Peanut, the studio cat:

Peanut

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Blogging to you direct from Aerie Studio in Austin, TX – we’ve just finished the basics for seven of the tracks for the new album. The players: Rob Hooper on drums, George Reiff manning the bass, Scrappy Jud Newcomb on guitar, Mark Addison and Scrappy co-producing. There is a mood and real energy and feeling to every song. Everything’s been broadened, lifted to a new level. I feel like the songs have real lives of their own now, bigger than me, which is the best. And all these great ideas lifting them up makes me feel like I’m really part of something. I don’t know how articulate I sound saying all this, but life is good in the space of making music with gifted players. Just now I was so relieved to hand over my guitar part in one of the songs to Scrappy – just to be able to say, this would be better for the feeling of the track – relieved to not have it be about me having to make my mark in that particular way. We have a couple more days of overdubs and then I head to Nashville to write with Phil Madeira who plays in Emmylou Harris’ band! I came into the studio this time with about 25 songs and now in Nashville I hope to write a few more. I’m interested to see how many I can write in this streak, in this space and time in the world, or my experience of it. It’s been a good streak since moving to Austin. I put myself on a mission this time around that if I could see an uplifting end to the story of a song, I would head for that. I was tired of beleaguering anything, feeling that a greater challenge would be to find the love in any situation. I think we’re calling the album Bound to Love, which was the title of the first song I wrote when I moved into my little cottage in South Austin.