Here is the tale of last week's trip to New York City to master our record.

Part Two: Snowballs and Eye Contact

Monday morning, the 6th. Dave and Jared had a couple business meetings uptown, so I could get my act together on my own clock. The mastering session wasn't until 4:30pm, so I had time to cruise around and work on the song sequence. The day was windy and cold, the kind of wind that sometimes you need to turn a corner and take a minute to let it blow by you before you walk a few more blocks. My plan was to walk downtown to visit a particular site, and end up in Chelsea at the mastering session.

As I walked down Park Ave. down into Soho, then into the West Village, I thought about one of the main differences between New York and Los Angeles. In the 30 minutes of walking I had done so far that day, I'd seen more faces, looked into more pairs of eyes than in a full week of living in Los Angeles. It's no secret that in L.A. you drive everywhere and can tend to live in a bubble of your own creation. Not so in New York. Just by going from place to place, you are forced to acknowledge the existence of so many other people. It's exhilarating to walk the streets and not keep your eyes down, to make eye contact and have those little moments of connection. So many lives and perspectives, so many backgrounds. Echoes of the world bouncing off the buildings, careening around the sidewalks.

After last night's walk by my old apartment, and into Times Square- the site of my old job, I continued my pilgrimage of past haunts, to the ScrapBar. Back when I lived in New York I went out almost every night. Most nights that meant starting at the ScrapBar. God, I loved that place. It was located on Bleeker Street at Macdougal, just a hidden door below street level accessible by a few stairs. Inside it was like a post-apocalyptic battleground, all wrenched tangles of metal and found objects, colored lights hidden beneath the wreckage, dim and inviting. A block of TV's always on behind the bar, and a bathroom that had seen more than it's share of illegal activity. When bands came through town on tour, they always would come by ScrapBar. It was usually packed, and full of my kind of people. I didn't know how much I missed those days until I was standing on the sidewalk above where it used to be, the door and the stairway now gone.

My favorite ScrapBar memory comes from my first winter in New York...

It was getting really cold and the sanctuary of the bar's heat was like paradise. Around 1am someone barreled down the stairs and through the front door yelling "it's snowing!". Everyone in the bar poured up the stairs and into the street which had been blanketed with about 3 inches of fresh snow. The bustling city street was quiet... I hadn't heard New York quiet yet. The light of the moon made the snow a pale blue. Taxis and other cars were scarce, and the street was open - perfect snowball fight conditions. We all pelted the shit out of each other with snowballs for about 15 minutes, without the fear of taxis coming by to ruin our fun.

Back to the future.

With no ScrapBar to visit, I settled for lunch across the street at the Figaro Cafe sitting with my music and sketchbook, still making sequence notes and tweaking my playlist, a table speaking French behind me.

The mastering time was fast approaching so I got moving west toward Chelsea. On the way I saw a cool statue, dedicated to the soldiers who fought in WWI from that neighborhood.

Got to Sterling Sound, home of our mastering guy Ted Jensen a little early, around 4pm. Sterling Sound is located at the Chelsea Marketplace. The ground floor is filled with farmers market-type storefronts and restaurants and the whole area has a cool rust and exposed brick architectural design vibe.

Josh and Dave showed up and we got to work on the master. The basic gig is this: Ted had the mixed versions of all 14 songs, and spent the first part of the day loading them into the computer. Each song has multiple versions, just in case we needed to swap versions at the last minute. After the final mastering effects are added, maybe the vocals seem too low? ...Then just use the "vocal up" version. Like that. His mastering suite faces the Hudson river and as the sun set, it made the river sparkle with the vanishing light. In the distance you can just see the statue of liberty. He has 5 large speakers placed around the room, each one shiny black, with an orb-like head, and each connected to it's own gigantic power amp. Ted applies a final selection of effects, compression, and limiters to make all the songs fit in together and sit in the same place sonically. We made a compromise between the sequence I had come up with and what Dave and Josh thought worked. A band is compromise, but just to be safe, I had him run off a slightly different "B" version.

The music sounded amazing in his room, but the only way to truly know how the mastering went would be to hear it wherever we usually hear music - in the car, at home, wherever. Ted was a nice guy, and we had a good time working with him in his little sonic lab with the insane view.

After mastering we all went to Nobu, the swanky Japanese restaurant for a celebratory meal on Jared's tab. Thank God, because I was still running on my initial 40 bucks, which would probably only have covered the bill for the water. We all decided to hit the town after dinner. Josh is not only a record producer but also we found, a skilled nightlife guide, so we let him create the evening's itinerary.

First, we went to the Mercer hotel bar to kill some time before the night really got cooking. I'm not so great at killing time, so I made myself a little quest to go get cupcakes at the Magnolia Bakery. The Magnolia Bakery is the place they name drop in the SNL "Lazy Sunday" rap, and I found out that they (like almost everything in NY) were open late. I hopped a cap there and got a bag of assorted goodies: cupcakes, snickers pie, butterscotch cheesecake, and chocolate mini-cakes... it's a celebration, bitches!

After hitting a hotspot called Bungalow 8 and rubbing elbows with the denizens of the night, we adjourned back to the W where Dave and I ordered some ice cream to go with our Magnolia stash, and made pigs of ourselves while watching a truly shitty move called "Two for the Money". As much fun as we were having, I still didn't feel much completion, much resolution, at least not as much as I had expected that I'd feel. Something seemed unfinished. Or maybe it was me.