Blog Archive

Happy 2012! As the No Solid Ground EP is released in the US, I thought I would post a review of the EP, as well as a link to a recent interview for Relate Magazine. More news to come soon!

[Video fun at the bottom of this page] I’m back in New York after returning from the New Zealand launch of Four-Letter Words, this travel pattern re-qualifying me for my self-proclaimed moniker of New Yorklander (as more than one person in NZ pointed out to me, ‘New Yorklander’ doesn’t just work in combining New Yorker and New Zealander; it also works pretty well in combining New Yorker and Aucklander. Silly me for not noticing).

It’s official: Four-Letter Words is out. In my homeland. Good old NZ. Thank you to all who supported the album’s release last week: Classic Hits; the NZ Herald/Canvas; Good Morning; Drew & Shannon Live; Marbecks, JB Hi-Fi; the whole team at Isaac Promotions and Frequency Media, and also everyone who showed up to the release party on Thursday night to rock out!

What a week…arrived in NZ on Monday morning kind of exhausted after a busy time over there, and then hit the ground running in NZ. There were a couple of tense hours on the flight from NYC to LA as a substantial delay made a tight connection even tighter, but luckily my fellow Kiwis at Air NZ still let me check in for my flight with only 45 minutes before departure for an international flight. I love Air NZ.

In a week I return to my homeland for the New Zealand release of Four-Letter Words, and after such a full journey since first meeting with producers Lee and Rich in April last year, I can’t say how excited I am to be able to start sharing the music. At the same time, this anticipation is tempered by the sadness of knowing that I’ll be returning home to a country facing the rebuilding of one of its major cities after the February earthquake.

The studio is in NYC, and I’m currently in NZ, so although we’re no longer in the studio (and yes, believe it or not, all of the recording is complete!), we’re still only halfway through the mixing of the album, so still a couple of weeks away from the completed Four-Letter Words.

This time I can say it with full confidence: it’s the final stretch! And I know it’s true because I leave New York in less than a week, bound for the New Zealand summer

November 21, 2010

OK, surprise surprise, my dramatic battle-cry on entering the final nine days of recording seems almost to have never occurred and was immediately forgotten in an anti-climactic reassessment of our timeline. This past week has revealed that we are not going to meet our Thanksgiving deadline, and the final stretch has turned into a final lap.

It’s the proverbial calm before the storm, with tomorrow morning marking the start of our longest studio session: nine consecutive full days, as we near the end of the main recording phase of the album. By the end of those nine days (i.e., by the arrival of Thanksgiving) we plan to have completed the tracking on the four remaining songs, two of which were begun last week.

I don’t usually whip out the old laptop on the subway – firstly because it’s just not that kind of place, and secondly because I’m paranoid about EMF’s around that part of my body (much to my friends’ amusement) – but it’s a bit of a hike from my place in Brooklyn to the studio in Midtown, and it’s time for another blog post, so here we go.