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SHAKING FAMILY

In the Studio

Shaking Family's Barbara Carter and Vince Emmett talk about the making of their premiere Elektra/Asylum album, "dreaming in detail "

By Paul Moffett

Guitarist Vince Emmett and vocalist/guitarist Barbara Carter are two-fifths of Shaking Family, a band which last year signed a seven-album deal with Elektra / Asylum Records. Besides Emmett and Carter, members of SF are: Tim Chewning, drums and vocals, Charles Ellis, keyboards and vocals and Brendan Lewis, bass. Over the summer, Shaking Family recorded their first album, dreaming in detail, for Elektra/Asylum Records.

Emmett and Carter, who are the primary songwriters for the group, were interviewed at the Twig and Leaf Restaurant in Louisville. The interview began with a lengthy discussion about pies. finally, over pieces of home-made coconut cream pie, with dishes cluttering in the background, talk turned to Shaking Family.

LMN: Have you been rehearsing since finishing the album?

BC: Trying to get the live show together.

VE: Exploring...

BC: ...new worlds of performance.

VE: When we finished the record in September, the plan was it was going to come out October 22 and we were gonna go on tour one of the greatest things that has happened is that the record didn't come out in October and that it comes out in January for many, many reasons. From early, early on, I've always been fascinated watching bands (that) were signed from Champaign, Illinois – there were lots of bands signed from Champaign – and I had a great time observing those groups and the records that they would cut. And it was always fascinating to me what happened to the second record. One of the main things (is that) you spend your whole life writing the first record and ten minutes writing the second. 'Cause when it comes, you use every great song on the first record, then go on tour, jump back in the studio and write while you're in the studio. So this has been a good time for us to recuperate from the summer.

BC: It's a whole lot more work making a record than anybody could ever imagine. There's so much less glamour to this business and I don't mean that in any bad way at all. I grew up thinking, 'Oh, those glamorous rock and roll stars, those glamorous county singers and literally being in awe of all that and now that we're trying to make a living doing that, it's more work than, there are more eighteen-hour days in a row this summer, there were more of those, sometimes twenty-hour days in a row than I've ever put together and Vince and I worked real hard on our first, locally-released album. We thought we were working hard then and we hadn't seen anything.

VE: It's hard work.

BC: It takes a whole lot out of you and that's why the last couple of months have been a real blessing, 'cause we've been able to take a deep breath and get ready for whatever's going to happen next. Plus write.

VE: Right in our home town.

BC: It's real important, coming home.

VE: When did we start recording, Barb?

BC: We started recording June 11. Actually, we left Louisville June 11. We didn't start recording till June 12.

LMN: That was in Bearsville?

BC: Uh, huh. What a lovely studio.

VE: Two hundred acres of absolute fantasy-land.

BC: It's like a technological fantasy-land., it's a spiritual fantasy-land., it's a physical fantasy-land., deer everywhere, mountains. Meadows – real natural meadows. Here we have places where they've chopped down trees so that they can plant corn, which we call a field. That's what I grew up with all my life. (In Bearsville) are naturally occurring meadows where the trees kind of dwindle out and there aren't any. There's this clearing where flowers and stuff grow.

VE: Grass about this high (three feet).

BC: A plow has never been through there. It's just a little meadow.

VE: In the morning when we wake up, deer standing.

BC: Just out there. We stayed in these old...

VE: Like old Cape Cod houses.

BC: They're kind of Cape Codish. The original, they kept building onto it, the original section of it.

VE: Separate from the studio, completely.

BC:By about a half a mile.

VE: Charles (Ellis) and I stayed in a renovated barn where the Who and the Stones would rehearse – John Lee Hooker's cut albums. A huge barn and right next to Our bedroom window, you'd open up the windows and (there was) a huge waterfall coming down. It was built to actually take you completely away from reality...

BC: And it did.

VE: It had its own old-time switchboard, so it's not that easy to call home or for someone to call and say, 'I need to talk to Vince right now.' Our manager couldn't get through. The atmosphere to record was beautiful.

BC: Very protective.

VE: You got there and you started to shed the daily things that you're used to and you were there to concentrate. You could start a thought in the morning, like 'I'm going to do this guitar solo today,' and you could continue that thought clearly, uninterrupted, all the way to the studio, plug in the guitar and do it. But you had an idea in the morning, slept on it, thought about, you could think about just like that until you grabbed a guitar and did it. You didn't have to go through traffic...

VE: No receptionists.

BC: You didn't have to deal with somebody who had a bad night the night before and didn't want to be at their job. There was none of that. It's unfortunate that everyone can't be that lucky. What a gift, for us to be in a position to do that.

VE: A real gift.

LMN: What was the high point during the making of the record there?

BC: When the music spirit came to visit us in Dreamland. Dreamland is an old church that's been renovated to some degree so that you can record there and what a spiritual experience we had there. It's hard describe what happened, but essentially it ended up that a guitar kind of played itself more or less and changed tone and pitch to go along with the changes in the music. It did this all by itself..

VE: It was late at night and I had been cutting all of my guitar parts behind the console, even when we were playing live and all the overdubs. We would take the big Geary 808's and turn them up really loud. I was using all hollow body guitars on the record. Really hollow body, no wood down the middle, like 335's and Birdlands and Gretches and the sound would be really cranked when I would do my pans. I would get feedback just like I would if I was standing in front of my amp and my amp was in the other room. We had cut the tracks, done most of the overdubs and we decided that we would try some layering. This was the only time we decided to layer something. The conversations were going on in the control room, late at night, Barbara was in the lounge just outside the control room, just waiting...

BC: Actually, I was in the sanctuary, laying on the couch, just listening to what was going on.

VE: Old wooden church, you could hear everything. So (Shaking Family producer) David (Tickle) said, 'Why don't we try it one more time and just do whatever you want to.' We'd tried a few things and didn't come up with anything either one liked. (So he said) 'Just roll it one more time and just stand there and see what happens and then we'll go home.' We pushed the track and the song started, it's real mysterious at the beginning, real dark and it really builds and builds and gets big. I hit the first note and brought the volume control up and let a note sustain, there was a harmonic and this was about the last time I touched the guitar. From then on, the only thing I ever did to the guitar was adjust the volume or switch pickups. The track was going through the guitar, telling the guitar how to feed back.

For specific parts of the song, we're going to have to sample this guitar to pull it off live. Because it would get to a chorus and the musical setups would start the guitar feeding back. So when we hit the chorus, the guitar would let loose like a vocal choir. It would just scream.

BC: You never heard anything like it in your life. I was laying on the couch in the other room away from this and it was so loud – they had it turned up so loud, I could hear everything. I was thinking, please, God, let the tape be rolling. Let it be going. I could hear this incredible stuff, coming through the walls. (I got) chills and as soon as it was over, I ran in the door.

VE: The engineer was standing back, gets up slowly, halfway through the song. I'm looking at them while I'm in the middle of this and I'm standing in certain spots to sustain the feedback, I'm in the sweet spot and look back and both of them have an expression exactly like an old-time movie, (mimics wide-eyed exaggerated surprise) and it's like, don't change anything, don't stop anything, just go and it went all the way through, all the way to the end. The very last thing that happened was, I was going through a wah-wah pedal that was busted. It was working backwards and it made this noise (imitates crackling, popping noise), totally unusable. At the very end of the song, the only movement in the studio was David Tickle. Out of the comer of my eye, I see him horizontal to the floor, flying and he dives headfirst and grabs the wah-wah pedal and at the very end of the song, he makes the pedal make its noise. And that was the last thing that happened.

BC: Then we all went around and cried.

VE: We cried like babies. It was overwhelming. It was the culmination of what a lot of things feel with us, in that we're vessels, waiting. If you keep the copper wire clear enough and the vessel clean enough, you're visited and if you're ready, it's there for you. That was an intense version of the same thing. We try to be ready and that night, it stepped on us, kicked us in the head that night and walked out and waved as it left. Nothing else happened that night.

BC: We just listened to it and sat around and talked about it. Then we went to bed.

BC: But I also got very homesick. It's the first time I've ever been homesick. We were gone for three months (and) we were home for eighteen hours from June 11 to September fifth or sixth. I was sick to see Kentucky and hear somebody who knows how to speak correctly. Somebody who knows how to say 'ya'll.'

VE: (They'd say) 'Y'all are from the South, aren't cha?'

BC: Yeah, 'Y'all sure do talk funny

BC: I needed to see green again, because we were in California the last month – it doesn't rain much, if at all in California, so it was kind of like this arid wasteland.

VE (sings): 'It never rains in California...'

BC: The sun never went away and the rain never came, there was no green, it was just cement sidewalks and smog. Man, I wanted to come home. I'm really glad to be back.

VE: One of the reasons I got so homesick 'cause all those songs that we have are about things that we've experienced right here. And we were playing those everyday.

BC: There's a real tie between what we do musically and where we come from. The Kentucky roots are really evident in the rock and roll that we do.

VE: We're very, very proud of that.

BC: We were playing that every day and it was like, 'This is L. A. but what we're doing is home' and it's like, waaaah.

LMN: I gather you didn't like going go to L. A. that much.

VE: We could have recorded there, but a few business trips to Los Angeles can tell you that it's not conducive to making records (although) people do it.

BC: Not the kind of record we wanted to make. We're not a heavy metal Sunset Strip leather and you know, we don't come from that really hard-assed, really mean, dog-eat-dog background and that's what you feel like when you're there – these people could eat me up. Will I get out of this alive?

VE: The only consolation was that the facility that we worked in was absolutely fabulous.

BC: The people we worked with in the facility were also superb.

VE: That's the one thing in California, throughout the whole thing were the unbelievable staffs and support people and techs and engineers. A & M studios in Los Angeles is a very classy place.

BC: Classy people, very professional.

VE: Phil Collins is down the hallway and Don Henley just finished here and ...

BC: Janet Jackson is coming over to do her promo on the front steps of the studio for her new Miss You Much. Everywhere you go, it's people doing their job well.

VE: Exactly. The studio that we were in during the evening … Belinda Carlisle was in during the day and they just handle that all the time. There were fifteen people on their technical staff, waiting for something to break.

BC: They're waiting for the cord to no longer work so they can jump up and unplug it out of your guitar.

VE: It's unbelievable. It's the old Charlie Chaplin movie sound stage, a whole block there. So we walked through those gates, (and) ... everything is safe but then we could walk back out of those gates (and) everything is dirty and smelly, back to L. A. I don't think we'll ever record someplace like that. Once you've been to Bearsville, once you've seen the mountain...

BC: Yeah, once you've been to Paris, it's kind of hard to get back down on the farm.

LMN: The place in L.A. was the studio that had five hundred of everything?

VE: They had everything. Now I can hear records and I hear an A&M record.

BC: You hear what makes that record sound that way.

VE: Fairchild compressors. That was the big one. Fairchild compressors used to be the thing that they used to cut the lacquers with the final compression they would make old records with. They were old lathe cutting compressors. And Shelley Yakus bought up eighty percent of the Fairchild compressors ever built. Ever built. They're everywhere and they sound so good.

They're real grungy and dirty and they have noise, but, gosh, they sound good, I hear them on records now. (I can say) 'That's a Fairchild, they cut that at A&M or they mixed it at A&M."

BC: It kind of gives Shelley a monopoly on the sound.

VE: The studio has its own sound because of them.

LMN: You sharpened your ears by hanging around these people?

VE: I learned a lot about making I unlearned a lot about making records.

BC: We learned a lot about ambient miking.

VE: Blending...

BC: We learned about performance in the studio versus technical...

VE: Track-by-track. We performed live.

BC: Capturing the live spirit of a performance in the studio versus taking it track-by-track and stripping it down, then building it up again. You can lose something in that.

LMN: That was David Tickle's preference, he wanted it to sound like it was performed live?

VE: Very much so. Our record sounds like it was live.

BC: That was one of the reasons we picked him (to produce).

LMN: If somebody hears the record, they can come out and it'll sound that way?

VE: I've got to say that it's one of the most exciting things about this record and how it's gone..

BC: It's a performance record.

VE: We were very, very concerned when we talked to the fifteen producers that we talked to, that we wanted to be able to take what we put on the first cassette as a guitar/vocal demo, (that) was worked up by the group, that then was performed by the group, we wanted that to be the record. We didn't want to go into the studio and turn into something else, turn into Bon Jovi, then come back and go, 'How the hell are we going to recreate this?'

BC: Or 'How did that happen to us?' We talked to a lot of different people, a lot of new groups, young groups like us, going to the studio for the first time and wanting to do their very best and make everyone happy. (They) trust everything to the producer and the producer has a different idea than they have. They come up with a record and they go, 'This isn't us, this isn't recognizable, how did this happen?' That was one of the things we were most concerned about when we were talking to producers, is that their idea and our idea be consistent, so that we could go in and trust the producer and know that we were going to come up with an album that felt like what we wanted it to feel like.

VE: Each digital delay or reverb that you plug in or each time you feel that what you've done on tape warrants stacking because of some insecurity that you have inside, is removing everything that you're doing on tape in your song one more step from the listener that sits in traffic and can listen to you or not. So much in the studio of mixing and/or layering and effecting a record is because of insecurity in what you're doing. It's like, well, let's double that and split it and ...

BC: It's like, 'Well, I don't think the vocal was very strong there, your voice did a little crack there, so let's either A, do it again or B, double it or C, double it and put a lot of 'verb on it.' So, what is that?

VE: It becomes a machine singing.

BC: So on the beginning of "Stand," you'll hear me singing and my voice is like right here...

VE: In your ear.

BC: It came this far out of my mouth and jumped into a microphone and went directly to the disc and now it's in your ear. My voice does a little crack thing and it's kind of endearing. It's like a real singer sings.

VE: It's real. It happens.

BC: That's what we wanted – to be able to come away without massive amounts of effects on anything, guitars, drums, vocals.

VE: Because you can't recreate that. They come to see you and they say, 'I've got the record, wow, I get to see Shaking Family, I'm from Philadelphia, but I'm not telling anybody about this and I'm really sorry I spent seven-fifty to come here.' (Laughs)

On the record, there are several songs with no reverb on the drums. No reverb.

BC: And on the vocal on "Girl On The Edge," except on the chorus.

VE: A little bit of delay on the chorus.

BC: flat It's nice

VE: In your face. It's bass, it's drums, it's guitar, it's vocal and it's keyboard. It's not wash of guitars, a stack and stack of vocals. It's like what you see at Uncle Pleasant's. The first reaction from a lot of people I've played the record for is (noticing) a lot of what we didn't do, what we didn't create. It sounds like a real band playing the songs in your face whether you like it or not. We can recreate that.

LMN: That's the plan, right?

BC: We're looking forward to touring, we're thinking that it'll probably be in March but that's such an indefinite plan. It could be sooner.

LMN: Have you done the same kind of background work for deciding who'll handle your road work as you did on picking your producer and studio?

BC: Some of that has already been firmed up, with lots and lots of research and some of it is still yet to be done. As far as picking who's gonna be on the crew, we're working on that now.

VE: We're interested in meeting people here locally. First As far as basic crew members, from your home town...

BC: When you go out on the road, it makes all the difference in the world to be surrounded by people who know you and what you're like and what your home is like. You lose sight of that really, really quickly when you get away from home and there's so much going on and these people (out there) have an attitude and a look and a game and a plan and it's such crap. You want to be able to drop that and go back to your room and say, 'I know you, I know where you live and I knew you for the last ten years.'

VE: When you're between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Tulsa, Oklahoma and that's sixty-one dates out of a seventy-five-city tour, the difference between having a hired L.A. crew and someone who's pulling for you who's from Louisville, too and has been in Uncle Pleasant's, it's like, 'Come on, man, we're out here doing it together.' It's a big difference.

BC: You rally around. Your attitude stays up.

VE: So we're interested in meeting people who want to put together a tight crew and a tight show and taking it to the people.

BC: Our booking agency is Monterey Peninsula. That's a deal that's been firmed up for a little while. They're a smaller group in Monterey Peninsula, California, with just five or six agents. They're not a monster agency and we feel real good about that and their ability to hook us up with other acts while we're out on the road that will be complementary to us. Chip Cooper is a really wonderful guy. He's our guy.

VE: He's been more to us than our booking agent.

BC1 HF has done more things above and beyond the call of duty. He helps us get information in this part of the country where there isn't a music business on every other corner. We have to go out of our way to find information and Chip Cooper has been instrumental with getting questions answered or gets the answers himself and relays the information to us. He's gotten us into shows that have given us ideas about how we might want to approach our show. That was way before we signed anything with them. He was just into the group and helping us and that was really valuable.

VE: We've tried to gravitate that way into as many areas as we possibly can and I think being from Louisville gives us a perspective and the ammunition to make those kinds of decisions. Or even consider those kinds of organizations. A lot of the thrust is usually to go with the biggest management firm you can get with and the biggest booking agency there is and the biggest this and the biggest that. Then it's like 'Who're you again? Oh, you're with us, right, you're signed with us.' I think it's serving us well, that special attention we get from (that) we might not get from a huge organization.

BC: They would have too much to do. In the large organizations, each person there is working thirty groups. They don't have time to take care of your concerns, like, 'I'd like to see that k. d. lang show in Cincinnati because I'm curious to see how she handles a certain guitar change or how her stage setup is or how she presents herself on stage. We could call Chip and he'd say 'Let me get back to you' and the next day, he's got tickets for you.

VE: I've noticed that a lot of my friends here in Louisville ask me, 'How did Shaking Family do this, how did you get a major label deal? You (must have) got hooked up with the biggest management here and hooked up with the biggest that,' but no, that's not what we did.

I want to say to my friends who tell me that they want to make records, who want to do what we're doing, (is) well, what we did is, step one first. As my grandfather used to say, if you what to be something, then do that If you want to make records, then make a record. We didn't have very much money and Big Ole Records was just getting started and they believed in us, so we believed in them. We'd go in and do the best job that we possibly could with what we had Allen-Martin was very good to us and gave us lots of leeway here and there, but it wasn't Bearsville then. It wasn't a management firm in New York City or a New York lawyer then. What was the most important thing? Making the best possible record that we could make with the tools available right then.

Sometimes the feeling was, 'I'm here in Louisville and I'm never going to be able to make those contacts or do those things, because if you're gonna get a record deal, you've got to be in New York or Los Angeles.'

BC: Mistake - mistake - mistake!

VE: It's not true. If you believe in what you doing and you play it with conviction, you're going to be found out yourself. You don't need the biggest record company or the most amount of tracks. I get that question a lot and I always get a real surprised look when I give that answer.

BC: You can accomplish a lot from this part of the country. The use of connections in Nashville is a really excellent place to start.

LMN: You have to find your own way, as Alan Rhody once remarked. You have to get out there and do the work.

BC: Yeah, you do, no one's going to hand it to you but there's no magic to it, there's no mystery, you keep calling and visiting people and believing in what you do and working at it and eventually if what you're doing is a good, productive thing, something good's going to happen to you. It'll work out.

VE: Somebody spending three or four dollars to see us at Uncle Pleasant's on a Friday night is no different than somebody spending six-fifty or seven dollars to see us at the Cannery in Nashville. When you look at the big picture, that's no different than somebody spending seventeen-fifty to see us at the Bottom Line in New York. People earn that money and want to come out and have a good time. If you're willing to play your songs and consider the reaction and if you're doing something and (they say), 'I can't listen to you, I'm sorry, I've spent the money but I've got to go now, this is noise,' if you're willing to be in touch with your audience and grow, Louisville audiences are not that much different than downtown New York City. They're people, spending money to have a good time.

BC: People want the same thing when they go out, within certain frameworks. Some people pick a certain kind of band to go see, the same way some people pick a certain kind of movie to see, so there's a niche for all different kinds of bands the way there's a niche for all different kinds of music. finding your niche and cultivating it and going with it is the smartest thing you can do. Whether it's heavy metal music or a horror film, people want something specific when they go out and if you give it to them, they'll come back.

LMN: It sounds like that there lurks underneath that some methodical approach to the concept of marketing.

BC: Well, no, we never had a marketing approach. People ask us that,/it was one of the questions that came up. A & R (artist and repertoire) folks would ask us, 'Who's your audience, who do you see marketing yourself to?' and we'd just look at them dumbstruck. All we ever did was play the music we'd written the best we could play it and see if the audience liked it and listened to their comments. If they said, 'I really liked that song, but last night it was a whole lot better,' then you know that you changed something and you go back and fix it. That's not really marketing, that's just paying attention to the response of people. Marketing is when you say, 'I'm going to put on black lingerie and these high heels and I'm going to strap on a guitar that looks this way and I'm going to be like Vixen or I'm going to be like Poison, because sixteen-to-twenty-year-old males like that kind of music,' that's music with a marketing approach.

LMN: Isn't paying attention to what your audience is saying what marketing is all about?

BC: That's a distinction that a lot of young groups don't make. They say, 'Hey, that works for them and I want to be a rock and roll star, so I'll do that.' It's a whole different level of approach.

VE: I've said this in every interview and I'll say it this time. The advantage of being from Louisville instead of New York or Los Angeles or even living in downtown Nashville, is that you're not aware of the flavor of the week. If you move to Los Angeles to make it and you're out there and starving like the rest of them and you see so-and-so band that's getting a deal because they did this, then you're going to start doing that.

BC: Because you're starving.

VE: If you're aware of the guitar trick down the hall and he's driving a Porsche and you're walking, then you're going to go, 'Ok, I'll do that.' But if you're from Louisville, Kentucky, you have a form that's greater than just about anyplace in the country. There's a real hard core soul here, because of the Appalachian mountain chain and the kind of music we have as a foundation in this part of the country. I wouldn't be from anyplace else. It's our American music heritage, it starts right there and goes all the way to Africa. To be a part of that, to have access to that, to meet people like J. P. Pennington and his mother, Lilly May Ledford from the Coon Creek Girls and to be a writer from this area, where there aren't many original bands, (at least) not enough to influence you, so you write it yourself. We'd get from people in the industry (that) we played pop music, but a little differently. It's a little different because we didn't know what was popular.

BC: We didn't know what other bands were getting signed on.

VE: People keep saying to us, 'Well, you've got a record deal, a record coming out, (so) when are you moving to Los Angeles?' That's a serious question, but why in the world would we live in L.A.? Why would we leave Louisville when we've got access to Nashville? It's a pleasant drive and there's a whole music business there, but then we can come home, retreat and play at Uncle Pleasant's on a Wednesday and not tell anybody. That's hard to beat.

LMN: You've been to Bearsville, to fantasy-land., so if it doesn't get you, it doesn't get you, does it?.

VE: It's a pleasant place. If we could afford to live there, we would live there. It was hard to leave. It was the closest thing to Louisville.

BC: I guess we're just not big-city people, Vince. I kind of like wide-open spaces. I missed the color green in California.

LMN: Has being constantly asked about the process of getting a deal and making a record had an effect on what you think and say?

VE: We've done it a few times. In a way, it helps me confirm what I feel.

BC: I see it as a real opportunity to offer information, to share an experience that we've had as a band from this part of the country. I love to have people ask me, 'What did you do, what was it like, how did you do that,' because that was not information that was readily available to me. Ten years ago, I was interested in a musical career, but I had no idea had to begin or what to do. I didn't think it was within my reach that I could ever have a record deal, I thought that was what happened to other people and they were already famous, already rich and then they got this record deal.

I welcome the opportunity to talk about it as a career like any other career, as a business like any other business and (I like) talking about what it was like to get from point A to point B and some of the feelings that went along with it (There were) disappointments, some surprises that went along with it, but I love to talk about it because that makes the information available to somebody who is ten years younger and thinks they can't do, but they can. They certainly can. There's a certain amount of talent that has to be there and that's a given in any business, but above and beyond that, it's a little bit of making connections with people who can help you and there are lots of people who are ready and willing to help. It's not focusing so much on myself as I do saying, 'Hey, I'm from Fern Creek, Kentucky and I've got a record deal.' It's not because I was preordained from birth, it's not because I left this part of the country, it's because I worked with a lot of really great people who had the same idea, a bunch of little idealists who wanted to accomplish a particular goal. We busted our butt to do it and had a lot of help on the way.

VE: I didn't go away and then come back to visit the little people to tell you how I did it. I've been here all along. It hasn't been that long ago that we were in the position of just wanting to get information. We still are, to a different degree.

We were playing at Pleasant's and Tewligans for nothing. We couldn't find a place to play. We would play anything, outdoor gigs, summer parties.

BC: We played some craziness in Evansville that turned out to be one of the most fun gigs we ever had.

VE: It was a movie theater and it was a thrash metal Saturday night after the movie and they let us open. We walked on stage with our tunes after the first group had finished playing and it was like six chain saws, revving and smoking,...

BC: Purple hair...

VE: Vroom, vroom

BC: Maniacs. It was eleven-thirty at night and these kids under the age of eighteen who couldn't go to a bar.

VE: 'Yes, you're doing the right thing, you need to

VE: So we're in this position and we're going to go do this gig, but I would love to talk to somebody that has done this before and ask them if we're doing the right thing. We're doing these crazy gigs...

BC: What would you recommend doing here? play as much as you possibly can now.'

BC: Play every gig.

VE: Do I need to move to Los Angeles? (Together) NOOOO!!

BC: Stay home.

VE: Stay home and keep working on your craft.