Good Times in Crayonville

The Crayon enjoys some lobster and some beer and some ocean and each other's company.

After doing a show at LC Live in SL on Friday night, I wanted to keep the musical ball rolling, but in another direction. As has been the case the past few weeks, we spent almost the entire remainder of the weekend with activities relating to our band They Stole My Crayon. First, a kind of different but nonetheless exciting development. Artist Kristine Schomaker, who is a friend of mine and Christina's from SL, had created a video to help showcase her latest virtual art installation that she calls "BLOOM". She needed some ambient music to go along with the video, and chose our song "Things Under Trees". The only problem was that the video was five minutes long, and the song was only 4:03. So, Bunny created an extended mix of the tune, and we happily provided it to her. She used the video at this weekend's "Brewery Artwalk", a twice-annual open house of the well-known huge art complex here in Los Angeles. We were surprised by the amount of news coverage this event got, and I hope a bunch of people are enjoying Kris' video with our song that, if I must say so myself, goes very well with the imagery she's created.

Kristine Schomaker's "BLOOM" virtual installation, set to the music of They Stole My Crayon's "Things Under Trees (Extended Mix)".

That afternoon, as we'd planned, Bunny came down here to the South Bay so we could do three things: hang out/have fun, talk about the plans for our current batch of music, and then eat dinner at a nice restaurant along with my teenaged son. I'm happy to say all three goals were met and then some. Without giving away too many Crayon secrets, what we did was do a listen to each of the songs we'd created, and determined which of them were worthy of inclusion on our upcoming debut album. With the narrowed-down list, we also made notes on what needed to happen next on each song... i.e., re-doing a background vocal, replacing a bass part, and so on. This was tremendously helpful.

Here I am with my bandmate Bunny and my son Sonny. No, that's not his name. It just rhymed well.

Yum.

I should mention now that despite the fact that we're narrowing down the songs for our first album, we're still writing and creating new songs. On Thursday night, I'd sent out an acoustic demo of a song I came up with, and the following morning I awoke to a lyrical/vocal contribution from Bunny on that song. Saturday morning, I started working on fleshing out that song, and by the time Bunny arrived, we had a pretty interesting song going. I tell you this to explain what I did on Sunday, which was to take a bunch of the notes we'd done on the songs, and start making the changes we'd discussed. That included work on the new song as well as detailed tweaks on "Bag of Nothing", "Favorite Things", and "When I'm Gone". We're really moving at breakneck speed, at least for our mellow little band.

The only other thing I want to mention for now is that as we start to get toward the end of the recording process, we're also talking about how this music will be released so the world can hear what we've been doing for all these months... er, years. Much like the music you can't hear yet, things are planned in that regard that we can't say yet... mostly because they may or may not happen, and we don't want to lie to people. For the time being, suffice it to say that we want to have the recording complete in the summer, and the album out in the fall of this year. Many things need to happen in between those seemingly simple goals to make it as good as can be, but we're ready for the tasks ahead.