Looking Back, It Took Me a Year to Plan This Tour. to Be Fair, I Spent the First
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Pete Kronowitt, excepts from the "Rabbit, Carrot, Button" Tour Blog Japan & China 2009 Prequel to the shows: why I did this crazy tour thing Friday, October 9, 2009 at 8:45am Looking back, it took me a year to plan this tour. To be fair, I spent the first 2 months talking myself into this craziness. This is my second sabbatical from Intel. Intel gives all US-based employees two months off to pursue any endeavor including sitting on a couch or building a school or...whatever. Employees are able to tack on vacation to the sabbatical which is approximately three months. Eligibility for a sabbatical occurs at each seventh anniversary. Our sabbaticals are a great benefit, one that probably entices employees to keep working at Intel a bit longer. I started considering ideas for my sabbatical about a year and a half prior to being eligible. I considered renting an apartment in a major American city and just living easy. Both New York and New Orleans came to mind. But then I started thinking about this crazy idea. After recording two full albums worth of music, I never had performed twice in the same week let alone consecutive nights. I always believed playing my songs night after night would somehow lessen the original inspiration for my music. Touring is repetitive. You play the same songs night after night. In a well practiced tour, every comment and song is rehearsed. I realize not every tour is like that but that was my perception. I was very wrong. My first CD was recorded while living back in the Washington, DC area. I happened to meet a brilliant producer through a mutual acquaintance. When I met John Alagia, he was recording some of the best acoustic musicians in the DC area out of his basement and charging $35 per hour. I had been writing songs for 10 years and had a couple dozen songs I would play publicly in open mike nights and at benefits. I met Alagia at his rented Virginia home and he showed me his approximately hundred thousand dollars of recording equipment. But what impressed me was his intuition for good music. He was working with all of the people I loved in the DC area. John was also part of an acoustic duo called Derryberry and Alagia, with his partner Doug Derryberry. John and Doug were working on their album ‘Reinvigorating The Wheel’ among other local folks like Kevin Johnson & The Lineman and Jimmy Laundry. Nobody outside of DC has heard of Kevin and Jimmy but they are awesome. So I decided to spend money I didn’t have on a project in which there were no specific goals with the exception of recording my music. I spent approximately 100 hours in the studio working with exceptional musicians and meeting others who would progress in their music careers getting signed by labels and working with major artists. Doug Derryberry toured with Bruce Hornsby. Matt Scannell, who played lead on guitar on Passive Day and Necessary Evils, was part of a duo called Vertical Horizon. There were signed and had a few hits in the mid-90s. I also met another acoustic duo named JackoPierce (Jack O’Neil and Carey Pierce) who was later signed and recorded an album with legendary guitar player and producer T-Bone Burnett. While working with John Alagia, he told me he found a band who was going to be ‘bigger than the Beatles’ and I should check them out. He also told me he was going to record their first album. So, I did check out the Dave Matthews Band and John did end up recording their first live album. John received production credits and the album was completed shortly before the band was signed by a major label. This meant they all made a huge amount of money by having a high quality live recording at the time they were signed. John kept getting production credits on subsequent albums. Since then, John has produced some big albums. Alagia produced John Mayer and Jason Mraz’s big albums. He also produced Ben Folds, and others. So, back to making my first CD. Generally there are two approaches to record a professional quality album. You can essentially record a live performance of a band and mike each instrument. This method is for well practiced bands. Each musician is then secluded into a separate room and each instrument has its own microphone. The second recording method is what we utilized to record my CD. The base tracks, normally the drums and bass, are recorded first and then every other part of the song is recorded separately including guitar, lead vocals, percussion and other instruments like organs, lead guitar and finally back up vocals. Each of these individual recordings begin as a single track on the song and are later combined. The more instruments and vocals on a song, the more tracks. This is a primary reason it takes 100 hours in a studio to produce a high quality album. John had a great array of available musicians and John scheduled a core group to play on my CD. Once you record each individual instrument, you need to mix parts and volume for each song. for example, the principal vocal track should be prominent, and audibly just in front of the musical instruments, but not overshadowing them. Once the mixing is complete all professionally recorded music is ‘mastered’ which means the volume quality is consistent for all of the songs on one album. In the meantime, you need to create artwork for the CD album and inside portions of the CD and manufacture the CDs. Then once all this work is done you have a product. In the outset this was just a recording project. I had not viewed my CD as a product. It was blood, sweat, life, love, friendship…but a product? I called the CD “Phases of the Heart”. I threw a CD release party and played a few times after that. I never marketed the Phases CD. I even had an offer to distribute it but didn’t pursue it. I was mentally exhausted, financially drained and never did a thing with the Phases. This is a long way to say…I didn’t do any marketing or promotion with Phases. I was proud of the work but had a day job in which I worked my butt off. I didn’t regret it. I had other priorities. And I never even wanted to tour playing music. I went through this process a second time with another producer. In 2003 I recorded “Threads” with a producer Pete Snell. After Snell toured with Lyle Lovett as his guitar player he built a good business recording Los Angeles musicians in a small studio about 3 blocks from my house. I didn’t put the same amount of time into the Threads project and let Snell drive a bit more of the creative process. The result was the CD did not represent my vision for the music. Some of it was better than I could’ve dreamed but other cuts were not for me. I did a modicum of promotion and we threw a fantastic CD release party. I hired all of the musicians who played on the CD and played at a big venue. It was one of the best nights I’ve ever had. I had a ball playing my music. I was Barry Manilow for a night. But we only played that one night. In early 2005 it appeared digital distribution of music was imminent. I revamped my website, re-recorded a few tracks and then re- released my third CD, ‘elements’ at the end of 2005. My idea was to take the fully produced songs on Threads and parse the music back to the sound of an acoustic trio. The idea came from a rough cut of my wedding song, ‘Now It’s We’. When I released the CD I did a small amount of marketing and only played a few times. As a matter of fact, I’ve only played out a few times in the last 5 years. I enjoy playing shows but the preparation requires an enormous amount of effort. Finally I can talk about my sabbatical. A year and half before my second Intel sabbatical I started thinking about the places I could go. It goes without saying two months without work is a rare opportunity. At first I had to talk myself into doing the tour. I knew I wanted to do this but felt it was crazy, middle aged crisis kind of stuff. What finally convinced me was a simple concept. If I didn’t do it now, I would never tour. I’d never know what it’s like. I contacted one of the musicians who played on my first CD, John David Coppola. I knew John from college. We lived on the same dorm floor and were in the same fraternity. I had played with John probably 10 times before. For my first sabbatical, John David Coppola came with me to Paris and we played a club, a few cafes and in the metro. Actually I’ve played more with Coppola than any musician. John’s parents are professional classical musicians and essentially brought John into the family business. John went on to play all kinds of music and did an outstanding job creating tasteful, upbeat bass lines for my acoustic songs on Phases. John didn’t hesitate when I asked him to go on the tour; not for a moment.