More Shaw Blades Info...upcoming winter tour
Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:09 amShaw/Blades now has 2 myspace pages:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... d=99803299
and
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... d=82441679
Here is some interesting info from the one:
CD and Tour
Tommy and I (Shaw/Blades) are doing the Alice Cooper Christmas Pudding in Phoenix Ariz this Dec. 16. Maybe a few surprise Shaw/Blades shows before the release of the CD.
Shaw/Blades "Influence" set for Feb 13 release with VH1 Classic. first single "Your Move" will be released mid-Jan. 07. We will be touring behind in mid Feb-thru March. Should be fun. We are setting up the stage like it is our living room and in fact we will have winners sit in couches on stage with us.
JB
SHAW BLADES
Influence
This album has been years in the making. The recording process didn't take years, but the concept had been looming in our conversations for a long time. We'd always sat around with a couple of guitars and play songs we both knew from our younger days, spontaneous harmonizing and all that but we slowly eased into the idea of making a record.
From the day Jack Blades showed up on my doorstep on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1989, we discovered our chemistry as writers almost immediately. I'm not even sure if we noticed how our voices blended. It just happened and I think we took it for granted, because we were focused on jumping into the **** Yankees experiment to see if it worked. Jack was in my laundry room downstairs as he was settling in and I heard him sing "I don't wanna hear about it--any more..." I went over to the piano and played, "Can you take me high enough?" and then called down for him to come up because I thought the two parts worked well together. Before the rinse cycle was completed we'd written the song. That's been our experience time and again working together. As writers were like two old friends who finish each other's sentences. We became best friends as a result of the music and the experiences we had because of it.
After two albums and two world tours with **** Yankees we decided to do our first SHAW BLADES album. We flipped a coin to see whose name went first. Typical of how simple we've always kept things. When we formed **** Yankees, I had been trying along with James Young to get STYX back together for three years and despite lawyers, managers and our best efforts we could not get all the members in a room at the same time, much less reunite the band. **** Yankees was a sit down at a sandwich joint, a "Let's do it this way," and it was a done deal.
The SHAW BLADES "Hallucination" album was a departure from **** Yankees in that it was more acoustic in nature, not nearly as heavy and more organically produced. Producer Don Gehman coined the term "car parts" for some of the vocal parts we DIDN'T sing, suggesting we leave those for people who were listening on their car stereos to sing out loud with us. To this day, people who know and own Hallucination tell us they have it in their car CD player and love to sing along.
On "Influence" we went song by song; some we held very close to the original versions, while on others we departed from the familiar arrangements and made them our own. We played all the instruments except for drums and an occasional keyboard parts which meant that some of the embellishments from the originals were reproduced with sounds from the guitar.
"Summer Breeze" has lots of interesting textures on the original Seals and Crofts recording, and I did my best to bring them to life by muting the strings to recreate percussion sounds and so on. It was like painting a picture with only primary colors, mixing our own shades as we went along.
"Your Move" was a combination of tipping our hat to the original, separating it from the second half of Yes' version and bookending it with an original composition.
"Lucky Man" was one we wanted to stay the course on, remaking it as close to the original as possible. Since neither of us were good enough keyboard players to play the Keith Emerson MOOG solo, I dug out this old pedal I'd gotten from Digitech years before but had never plugged in--a pedal that allowed you to do dive bombs up or down by manipulating the pedal and settings. This gave us the same kind of portamento solo energy as the original but made it our own at the same time.
"For What Its Worth" was one of the first songs we recorded, an experiment to see how we sounded covering a classic, this one from Stephen Stills when he was in Buffalo Springfield. We got braver as we went along, taking Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock" to a whole other level. I'm surprised no one has ever cut that in a heavier version. It was a natural.
Jack's son Colin, a very experimental songwriter himself, is always playing with different tunings and he showed me this tuning that he said was a typical Johnny Reznik (Goo-Goo Dolls) tuning. I tried "Dance With Me" and it came to life in a way I'd never heard it. I'd played that song in bars back before I joined STYX, but the original was sounding a little too sweet for us in that form. This tuning gave it some darkness, which set the lyrics in a more introspective tone. Jack's bass, Randy Mitchell's drum loops, and a little sprinkling of mandolin dust was all this one needed.
Carousel by the Hollies was one that almost suffered by us getting it more in tune than theirs. All of these originals were recorded long before the days of digital auto tuning. Nowadays, people's ears can detect the slightest bit of out-of-tune-ness. If you listen to pop country music from this current era, they have made auto-tuning into part of the art form. Vocal choruses are so perfectly in tune now that if you were to look at the sound wave it would be smooth as glass. The particular out-of-tune-ness of the Hollies vocals really defined their sound, so in order to still keep the vibe of their original version, we were careful not to make it too perfect.
TS
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... d=99803299
and
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... d=82441679
Here is some interesting info from the one:
CD and Tour
Tommy and I (Shaw/Blades) are doing the Alice Cooper Christmas Pudding in Phoenix Ariz this Dec. 16. Maybe a few surprise Shaw/Blades shows before the release of the CD.
Shaw/Blades "Influence" set for Feb 13 release with VH1 Classic. first single "Your Move" will be released mid-Jan. 07. We will be touring behind in mid Feb-thru March. Should be fun. We are setting up the stage like it is our living room and in fact we will have winners sit in couches on stage with us.
JB
SHAW BLADES
Influence
This album has been years in the making. The recording process didn't take years, but the concept had been looming in our conversations for a long time. We'd always sat around with a couple of guitars and play songs we both knew from our younger days, spontaneous harmonizing and all that but we slowly eased into the idea of making a record.
From the day Jack Blades showed up on my doorstep on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1989, we discovered our chemistry as writers almost immediately. I'm not even sure if we noticed how our voices blended. It just happened and I think we took it for granted, because we were focused on jumping into the **** Yankees experiment to see if it worked. Jack was in my laundry room downstairs as he was settling in and I heard him sing "I don't wanna hear about it--any more..." I went over to the piano and played, "Can you take me high enough?" and then called down for him to come up because I thought the two parts worked well together. Before the rinse cycle was completed we'd written the song. That's been our experience time and again working together. As writers were like two old friends who finish each other's sentences. We became best friends as a result of the music and the experiences we had because of it.
After two albums and two world tours with **** Yankees we decided to do our first SHAW BLADES album. We flipped a coin to see whose name went first. Typical of how simple we've always kept things. When we formed **** Yankees, I had been trying along with James Young to get STYX back together for three years and despite lawyers, managers and our best efforts we could not get all the members in a room at the same time, much less reunite the band. **** Yankees was a sit down at a sandwich joint, a "Let's do it this way," and it was a done deal.
The SHAW BLADES "Hallucination" album was a departure from **** Yankees in that it was more acoustic in nature, not nearly as heavy and more organically produced. Producer Don Gehman coined the term "car parts" for some of the vocal parts we DIDN'T sing, suggesting we leave those for people who were listening on their car stereos to sing out loud with us. To this day, people who know and own Hallucination tell us they have it in their car CD player and love to sing along.
On "Influence" we went song by song; some we held very close to the original versions, while on others we departed from the familiar arrangements and made them our own. We played all the instruments except for drums and an occasional keyboard parts which meant that some of the embellishments from the originals were reproduced with sounds from the guitar.
"Summer Breeze" has lots of interesting textures on the original Seals and Crofts recording, and I did my best to bring them to life by muting the strings to recreate percussion sounds and so on. It was like painting a picture with only primary colors, mixing our own shades as we went along.
"Your Move" was a combination of tipping our hat to the original, separating it from the second half of Yes' version and bookending it with an original composition.
"Lucky Man" was one we wanted to stay the course on, remaking it as close to the original as possible. Since neither of us were good enough keyboard players to play the Keith Emerson MOOG solo, I dug out this old pedal I'd gotten from Digitech years before but had never plugged in--a pedal that allowed you to do dive bombs up or down by manipulating the pedal and settings. This gave us the same kind of portamento solo energy as the original but made it our own at the same time.
"For What Its Worth" was one of the first songs we recorded, an experiment to see how we sounded covering a classic, this one from Stephen Stills when he was in Buffalo Springfield. We got braver as we went along, taking Simon and Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock" to a whole other level. I'm surprised no one has ever cut that in a heavier version. It was a natural.
Jack's son Colin, a very experimental songwriter himself, is always playing with different tunings and he showed me this tuning that he said was a typical Johnny Reznik (Goo-Goo Dolls) tuning. I tried "Dance With Me" and it came to life in a way I'd never heard it. I'd played that song in bars back before I joined STYX, but the original was sounding a little too sweet for us in that form. This tuning gave it some darkness, which set the lyrics in a more introspective tone. Jack's bass, Randy Mitchell's drum loops, and a little sprinkling of mandolin dust was all this one needed.
Carousel by the Hollies was one that almost suffered by us getting it more in tune than theirs. All of these originals were recorded long before the days of digital auto tuning. Nowadays, people's ears can detect the slightest bit of out-of-tune-ness. If you listen to pop country music from this current era, they have made auto-tuning into part of the art form. Vocal choruses are so perfectly in tune now that if you were to look at the sound wave it would be smooth as glass. The particular out-of-tune-ness of the Hollies vocals really defined their sound, so in order to still keep the vibe of their original version, we were careful not to make it too perfect.
TS
