Oh, I know his name, yes.
A great Texas singer/songwriter and guitar player. He's played with Bonnie Raitt for a while and he's just a brilliant, brilliant musician and a sweet, sweet man who sadly has died. His cancer came back and he's gone now.
Well, that's a sad thing.
It's a very, very sad thing and a bit scary too. But he did his last record, it was called From the Five on New West Records, and it is such an incredibly beautiful sounding record and so beautifully mastered that I had to know who did it. It was Gavin, and that totally made my mind up.
I've heard musicians say that when they try to keep track of how much they're spending to make their recordings and where they want to put the most investment in the process technically, they often think, Well let's spend the most money on getting it mastered right because if that's not done correctly then everything else we've done before that is all for naught.
You know, I'm so glad to hear that you're talking to people that talk like that because most of the musicians I know don't know enough about it to know that. And they'll spend all this money and time making a great record and then do a shit job of mastering it.
It really serves a purpose to take something of a do-it-yourself ethic toward your recordings, especially now with record companies being the increasingly obsolete dinosaurs that they are, it's more conducive to doing things by yourself and watching over all the details of it. And if you have to pick and choose the details apart from the financial aspect of it I suppose the final process in the recording sequence of events would be the one to give your attention to.
I think in truth it's a balancing act throughout the whole process. It's interesting that you talk about that stuff because along the way in making the record, there were a lot of fudges. I could reveal that with the actual guitar tone on a lot of the tracks, we actually had something different in mind entirely. We weren't paying much attention to that because we were going do a process called re-amping where you take a direct guitar signal and you have the guitar sound up and you're just using it as a reference and later on, you take that guitar signal and run it into a real amp and mic that amp. And you can change the tone and make sure the guitar tone is really great for what everybody else is up to before you mix. Well, the direct signal didn't get recorded, so the guitar tone that we spent no time on and didn't care about because we weren't going to use it, that's the guitar tone that's on the record. So in a lot of instances, we're sitting there massaging stuff. Let's just say it wasn't our initial intent.
Well, that's another thing that I've heard musicians mention more often than I ever expected, how that element of serendipity figures into the final finished product of a recording when you can't think of everything all the time and all of a sudden you turn around and something has happened unbeknownst to everyone involved in it but then seems absolutely perfect for what you want it to do.
Absolutely, so much of it is about trust. So much of the process of playing and making music in general is about trust.
It occurred to me listening to the album today what a great show it would make for you and the band or as many people as you could get involved to play the entire Walk Through the Fire as an evening of music from start to finish.
You know, I would love to do that, and the original intention was actually to do something quite similar to that for the CD release.
I see you got a CD party coming up.
We'll have a small one; we're not going to make a big deal out of the CD release part of it. It'll be our first opportunity to have a show in the Bay Area so we're certainly going to announce the CD and pump it up a little bit, but I don't know if we're going to have the cavalcade of stars, but it was originally our idea to take some place like the Great American Music Hall over and have a big party as the ta-da, and invite the Persuasions and Payne and all those guys to play, or whoever we could get that was around.
Well, don't ever let that idea go, that's such a great idea and the music's so good.
We may have to do it for another purpose. My wife and I are talking about putting a cancer benefit together.
I was thinking what a great idea that would be for something like the Rex Foundation or some other charity that would benefit from it. You'd have a very unique event tied with a very honorable cause at the same time.
Absolutely.
I say don't let go of it because I think it was almost ten years after Los Lobos released Kiko, and two or three years ago they did some shows where they performed that album in its entirety.
Is that right? That's one of my favorite albums of theirs.