the black angels are fantastic

a few new things- i bought a ticket to see swervedriver at the metro next weekend. after nina nastasia cancelled her upcoming show and with all the swervedriver listening i've been doing lately, i finally did it. i also finally bought a minidisc recorder, which i just paid for today. it comes with a mic and a bunch of minidiscs. the idea, of course, is to record the swervedriver show and then the black angels and warlocks show hopefully getting the kinks worked out and then onward to glory- spiritualized at pitchfork, my bloody valentine, both nick cave shows (did you hear that stefanie?), our entire tour.
speaking of our tour we made a fantastic breakthrough yesterday. someone from the university of montana at bozeman called us back and said that he had some dates in mid-september to fill. this is quite nice as when i mailed out fliers i accidentally forgot to change the dates on the spokane and montana fliers to early october and now that the route has reversed it ended up being a blessing. this one show will help immensely to pay for the rest of the tour. we have three things to help us now- my dad is planning on giving us some money, we are housesitting for jay and diana in august and now this show. we asked for $600 i think in the flier. colleges pay well. this does not mean that the show will not be a bit demeaning in some way, but at least it's something. so again i'm all antsy to get the rest of it all firmed up. haven't heard back from the metal dudes. i emailed tony york yesterday but he seems to have disappeared completely. he hasn't logged into either of his myspace pages in about six months- hope he's ok. it'd be a real shame for us to go to portland and not get to hang out with him at all.
i also bought the newest black angels cd. it's absolutely fantastic and i've listened to it about three times now. far beyond my expectations. i'd only heard snippets of their live set on kexp. i was listening to it here at the coffee shop and figured it'd be better to just listen to it at home where the connection is better.
i'm slowly but surely working on the 'angels floating on the head of a pin' video. so far it's about 40 seconds long. woohoo- only 6 and a half minutes to go! yeah! i haven't really drawn anything new for it at all either- i was going to try to do somewhat of a storyline, but that doesn't look so promising at the moment. maybe i could do some work on it today? maybe not.
we've been very sidelined with this project that we came up with- we're making cds of cover songs for our dads for father's day. i think we have nine cover songs in various stages of completion. stefanie's only sang on a few of them. like a lot of things we've done there are tons of mistakes- particularly on the version of 'long long long' that i did- i kept the first take, but it had some pretty glaring errors- i held a chord for too long that isn't even supposed to be there and then sang the next line a bit out of key- or maybe a lot. i did another take of it that was better (or so i thought). when i went to add more i'd forgotten that i still had the first take recorded, so i added two guitar parts that turned out pretty sweet- one was a mellow ringing feedbacky type thing and the other was just a high trilling guitar thing before i realised that i hadn't done them over the second take which is what i'd meant to do. once i figured this out i tried to work on the other one and was just getting absolutely nowhere and spending a lot of time doing so, so now i'm stuck with the first take, which when i was doing the parts i didn't really notice anything bad about it, so in the end it might be a good thing. the one that's turned out the best is probably 'suzanne' by leonard cohen. i seem to have changed the vocal melody, i just couldn't do what was on the recording without second guessing myself, so just did what my instincts were telling me to do and really it isn't that different and is in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the melody of the song and it sounds the best out of all of the covers we've done so far. i need to have stefanie sing it and possibly add a stark drum part possibly with some glockenspiel added in. tuning-wise i am really proud of what i did with it- rather than put the capo up really high (like it is on the recording) i tuned the guitar down a step and a half and played the voicings so that i could use all open chords (except one) and then it translated into standard tuning with different bowed-guitar friendly voicings which i added to really nice effect. i think when it's all done i might send it out and make it available as a zip file or something. so far here's a list of the songs we've done-

knock loud (neko case), harvest moon (neil young), nighttime (big star), 4th time around (bob dylan), suzanne (leonard cohen), long long long (the beatles), play with fire (the rolling stones), ring the bells (the kinks), candy says (the velvet underground)

i figured out how to play 'darlin' ukelele' which is my favourite jolie holland song. i might take a crack at that one today. generally speaking we're operating under the quick and dirty rule. it's kind of fun to see if we can get this finished and shipped out in time. we started last weekend. i'm just curious to see if we can do it since we take so much longer with everything else we do that's ours on our own. it's kind of brought the ep to a stop. kind of annoying, but that's ok. hopefully they'll like it. i think i'm going to send this in addition to a cd for my dad. not sure what it will be yet.
what else? i think that that might be it for today.