Update from the NZ album release

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.

We’ve had a number of band rehearsals this week to learn the new songs.  I love these dudes – Richard Mrkusich on guitar, Chris Grant on drums and vocal harmonies, and our newest addition, Chip Matthews, on bass guitar.  Photo (well, an attempt) attached.  It’s very exciting for me, because this is the first time I’ve played these songs with a band!  Up until now, the songs have existed only in the studio or on my acoustic guitar.  Now I’m unleashing my electric, and we’re arranging the songs for live performance, which is always a challenge because the layers of guitars and various melodic instruments that are at our disposal in the studio, all get reduced down to two guitars (Richard’s and mine). Luckily, Richard is studious and talented, so between several Skype conversations and some detailed emails, by the time we had our first rehearsal on Monday night, all of our parts were pretty much decided on, requiring only some tweaking.  And I’ve had my own fun experimenting with some new electric guitar sounds…I’m using a Line6 M9 this time, because it’s compact, simple and versatile.  Everything I need.

As much as I love Air NZ, my NZ band, my NZ mates and the beautiful early autumn weather we’ve had this week, I have to say I CAN’T STAND the time difference from NYC to NZ.  Every time I arrive here, I experience great difficulty adjusting to the new timezone.  I find myself waking every night at 3am or thereabouts and incapable of falling back to sleep.  By this stage, I’ve finally reached the point where I believe my tiredness will override the fading jetlag and ensure that I sleep well tonight.  Early night tonight, that’s for sure.

Well, tomorrow, April 4th is the Four-Letter Words NZ release day!  A lot has been achieved this past week with the team here and the band, and we’re all ready to go for the upcoming release week – one final rehearsal tomorrow, interviews throughout the week, the Good Morning show on Wednesday, I think C4 and Juice TV sometime this week too, and then the release party on Thursday night.  Yeah  (hey, I just realized that ‘yeah’ is a four-letter word too…yeah.  Word.  Word to your yeah.)