Tag: nevada city

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First off, I’m thrilled to let you know that I’m opening for AFI on January 28th in Santa Cruz… why thrilled you asked? as opposed to excited? Well, I’ve passed through the excited threshold and into the realm of thrilled because AFI is a band I’ve admired for a long long time, and who, in their music and their unrelenting devotion to creating their own sound, their own way, have become one of my favorite bands ever. So basically I’m opening for some musical idols. Pretty cool.

Next off, life has been changing in big and little ways, mostly big… I now live in Los Angeles… still settling in but indeed, it is done. We’re perched on a little hill and I’m really excited to see how the music fares down here.

Last off, for now, I have a lot to say for and about Nevada City. Though I feel very happy to move forward etc., I feel I owe a great debt to all the amazing musicians and friends I made there, and have a good long rant to write about all that. Will miss the good things there… very much!

Onward!

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Oh I apologize for the disconnect… I’m out and about, making a move to a different spot on earth and, not surprisingly, being in transition makes everything else go “pause”.

It’s exciting… so much going on. I’m looking forward to playing great shows, meeting amazing people, and generally making music more often.

I also have a lot to say about the greatness of Nevada City. So I’ll be posting soon. Wish me luck!

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Yesterday REDWOOD SUMMER finally made its way onto iTunes which signified a kind of final touch to the release of an album. (JUNEAUREVOIR is still on its way there)…

So how does an album come about from start to finish? I’ll tell you the story of REDWOOD SUMMER…

Basically a year ago I decided I was going to record a new album… the steam had stopped whistling for MIDNIGHT DOOR and it was time to explore new songs again. Only I became distracted when making MIDNIGHT DOOR… I was frustrated that I had recorded all these songs off that album without having a real live setup for performing them. The songs were written on the road and out in the world, not the usual where you try out songs live generally before they make it on the album. I was stripping the songs on MIDNIGHT DOOR down to the drum and bass tracks and pressing play on my ipod and performing along. Which, I have come to accept, is totally legit, especially of course if it is YOUR music you are playing along to, your beats, your sounds. I used to think it was not so legit, until I saw a few performances that incorporated the same technique, and it didn’t feel or seem weird to me at all. One caveat of this is that I really think if you play along to beats it HAS to be electronic… it’s true to me that playing along to ‘real’ sounding drums from a machine is kind of cheesy looking/sounding (in my opinion). Plus, then you are truly playing with the whole organic meets electronic thing, which does yield some interesting results and feels very much a part of our times. I think I like Thom Yorke’s solo stuff so much because he is able to work with (besides the brilliantly abstracted beats and great compositions) his raw voice, very plainly effected, wafting over the top of what feels like a Bladerunner landscape.

Holy tangent.

Anywaaaaays, the point is is that I got distracted by working on beats and effects that I could perform live, without accompaniment, and most importantly, which left lots of room for improvisation if necessary. My thing with electronic music and all music really is that if there is no room for improvisation at all, if it is super super polished and things are always done “perfectly” and the same, it is not really music. It’s theater. Which is fine. But I feel like at the core of music is the subconscious and its yearning to budge in and elbow things around here and there. I feel like it’s about the emotions of a room becoming one with the music. Et cetera.

So I worked on that and played a few different art party type things, improvising cello over beats around set songs and making the beats go this way and that and using lots of effects.

How did that lead to REDWOOD SUMMER which is very organic and non-electronic? Well, I just kind of missed making bedroom acoustic guitar anthems. I got so far away from home with that stuff that I really felt sentimental about sitting down and writing poetic lyrics by a fire with an acoustic guitar. Which is EXACTLY what happened with the writing of REDWOOD SUMMER… we had the opportunity to house sit a really beautiful house in Nevada County, with vistas of the foothills and gorgeous star filled skies, and there was a woodstove and no tv and no internet and the evenings were cozy and quiet. And I just started writing songs like crazy.

Most songs you hear on REDWOOD SUMMER were written in a three week period in January (more irony). Usually the process was to just grab ideas quickly, really as quickly as possible, meaning not interrupting the flow of musical idea by writing it down… this time I just used a handheld recorder, played through a new “song”, whether it was finished or not, and then started another. If it was any good, I kept it and worked on it. I’m not sure what my lyrics sound like to you, but you might be surprised to know there was a pretty good amount of polish on them. Obviously I’m not a real storytelling songwriter, but I do like to make the words work their own story and set their own stage. I spent a lot of time on various pretentious preconditions that I won’t bore you with.

I really wanted to record these songs to album as quickly as I was writing them, but you know, life gets in the way. We had to leave that housesitting gig but actually ended up returning in April I believe it was. By this time I was anxious to get this REDWOOD SUMMER thing on tape, I had a good sense of what I was doing and what I wanted, and I didn’t want it to slip by… so I set up my recording equipment in the upstairs bathroom of this great house, which had a really big all tile shower. I fit all my mics in that shower. I liked the closeness of the sound that the mics picked up in there. I tried just doing things simply, getting good guitar takes first and foremost. A huge part of REDWOOD SUMMER was playing guitar a lot again, so it was important to lay that down. Another part of the album though was actually, really, fully incorporating the cello into the main thrust of the song, making the cello NOT a supporting instrument but the center of the sound.

So what I wanted, by the way, was a country album. Well, not a country album in the traditional sense, but an album that felt like the places I’d grown up, the woods. I’m not sure that that makes sense or that it translates at all, but that’s why you have side A with its sparkly, sunny, swaying rhythms, and side B with its darker undertones. It feels like meadows and forest to me, it feels like Northern California to me. And of course, I wanted the process to be more “like it used to be” when I wrote songs: the edge of a bed in a lonely room to sit on, a quiet spot on earth, and no “coolness” filtration, no “authenticity” filtration, no input whatsoever from the “tastemakers“.

So I got most of the basic tracks down. I recorded cello and guitar, and I sang most lead vocals.

By that time it was May and soooooo much more time had gone by than I wanted.

The last four months of album making are probably the strangest for an independent musician. You gotta understand, when you are working full time and being a musician in your other time, there is no label pressure for a drop date, there is no pressure whatever, and so it is very very easy to let albums slide along and before you know it it takes 5+ years to finish an album. I have seen this happen many times, and I just really wouldn’t like the feeling. For one, or perhaps the main thing is that I try and capture a specific window of time/my life/my thoughts/the world in my albums, and if it takes more than a year it just seems like too much input on that front, too many influences. I mean, I had already been completely influenced by the Nevada City music scene subconsciously… I really thought that the mountain melodies and rocky yuba campfire cabin ghost song vibe wouldn’t get to me through Mariee Sioux, Alela Diane, Casual Fog, Them Hills and others, but they did, dammit I admit it, they did influence me. They inspired me to return to my personal truth being the core of the music. Purity of vision, untampered. It was really playing with Aaron Ross that had this affect on me the most. I have never heard let alone met a songwriter so talented and so potent with their own truth in music. And I was hanging out with him all the time, recording albums, playing shows!

The last four months were just a matter of gathering people in one place. It seems easy but for some reason it can be maddening. I wanted a real ‘community’ vibe on a lot of the songs, and getting Aaron Ross and Cody Feiler to sing on a lot was essential. Molly Allis banged out the drums in one day (one one take mostly! she is amazing), and of course Chuck Ragan and I met up for an afternoon to trade music. There were still lots of little things missing, the cello solo in the middle of ‘True North’, a piano for ‘The First Step’… these things really just kind of slowly slowly fell in line. But the finishing magical touch was realizing that my beautiful and way too modest girlfriend has a beautiful voice. We started by recording her voice on ‘Soundless’ and I realized I needed that voice on a lot more of the album. What was good about that was that it was pretty easy to get her in the same room with me! The “choir” you hear in ‘Strobe Light’ was recorded the day before I finished off the album, layering loads of her lovely voice until a big enough sound was achieved.

So, yes, this is an epically rambling post and I congratulate you for reading this far…

So you’ve got the thought of the album, you’ve got the writing of it, you’ve got the preliminary recording, and then the tricky follow up recording. Now you’ve got to do something with it.

As an independent musician (without a lot of money) you end up doing your own mixes, and therefore listening to the songs over and over and over and over and over again. I’m not very good at mixing, I always want all elements to be louder, and have a hard time with nuance in sound, but I learned a lot with this album. In the end though I’m not sure if I would have ever landed on what I wanted, it changed too much. It would be ideal to hand off songs to an external ear that you trusted and then say “have at it!” but it’s just not possible for me. I’m a control freak about my music, and plus, I felt my tracks were a mess and wouldn’t want to do that to someone!

Basically what happens is you spend four hours straight looping the chorus of one song trying to decide if the cymbal is too midrangy and whether the cello should have a touch more reverb. It’s kind of awful and time consuming but somehow rewarding.

Lastly you just set a date to send it off to be mastered and you stick to it. Because the mixing could literally go on for-ev-er. Thankfully Grass Valley is blessed with the best engineer with the coolest studio and greatest gear and mostly an incredible ear in Dana Gumbiner of Station To Station Recording… The luxury of calling him up is not something I took for granted.

He took my final mixes and really really filled them out. He made the sound of the cello big, and the sound of the backup vocals full. He kind of technicolored the album, in short.

So, and really, this is the part I want to get to… so you are done. You have the final mix, all mastered, and in your hands.

You may have noticed that there is not a lot of time to think about promotion, with everything else going on, let alone booking shows. But that, my friend, is what you must go and do.

I make my CDs through a ridiculously great and anonymous company that cranks them out quickly for me, and most importantly, for my meager budget, does not require that I buy 1000 at a time. At that point I send them to CDBaby, which gets them for sale, and also sends the digital files off to iTunes and Amazon and a number of other digital retailers. CDBaby truly is necessary for the independent musician, especially moving forward into the digital age.

And also, because if you’re reading this deep into the post you must be somewhat interested, also you wait. You put the CD out and you wait. You wait mostly to hear the pebble reach the bottom of the well. A few friends and family casually tell you that they like the album and it makes you glow for days. You check your email and website statistics incessantly to see if it is spreading on its own. You spend a lot of time doing that, it’s true, and I bet it’s true for most artists so I’m not afraid to admit that I’m in the phase where you are rather keen on listening for whispers of feedback.

The next and perhaps last step of an album though, and don’t you forget it, is to go out and play shows. You can’t can’t can’t sit around waiting for feedback. You have to go and bring the music to people directly.

And so the life of an album evolves. I still really really want to put out a vinyl version of REDWOOD SUMMER and JUNEAUREVOIR. I think it would sound great on vinyl. I’m working on a big move, and I really would like these albums to get wider distribution. It would be great, of course, if a label with reach picked either of them up. Playing more shows will be great. Getting JUNEAUREVOIR and its cello epicness into film would be my dream with that.

But mostly you, sitting somewhere, maybe standing, maybe headphones, maybe not, maybe at home, maybe in your car, maybe with yourself or with friends, mostly you hear it. Mostly for maybe only 1 minute, it makes a dent on your day and makes your day more important and beautiful the way that music can do that. Maybe it becomes a companion for a few months because it speaks to where you are at in your life. Maybe you know someone who it seems like would love it. That’s the final, and most important step. It could be now or 20 years from now. That’s one thing I love about making things. You never know…

Wow thanks for going with me down those million tangents. In short, REDWOOD SUMMER is done but not done. Hope this inspires you to bring things to completion (but not completion)… if anything, it might be oddly inspiring that 10 songs could take over a year to get out to the world… and yes, the year is worth the effort.

Be well, enjoy October,

Luke.

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I’m looking forward to this awesome show that Huff This! from NYC put together in Nevada City… I’m playing cello with Huff on a few songs. Their music is really haunting and beautiful, passionate and well written. Piano, and drums, and sometimes guitar. 

Black Bear, who also are really so great will also be playing, and there will be an art installation from Matthew Gottschalk… seriously this will be fun, come out!

“Huff This! with Black Bear and Dolli Melaine Huff This will be accompanied by Luke Janela on a few songs, Thad Stoener-guitar/bass, Dolli Melaine-vocals, Pete Newsom-drums and there are gonna be dancers! also Black Bear is going to be in its full six person formation which is totally dope. Matthew Gottschalk is going to be do a crazy string vortex istallation. and Dollie Melaine (back from Vienna) is going to kick off the evening with her dramatic vocals. we will not be selling alcohol.”

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Dear Nevada City,

Last night I was out in your wilds and down at the old Chief Crazy Horse bar. Casual Fog was playing and the room was full of young people, and old people, the bartenders were frantically busy. It was an electric night.

It reminded me so much of the first night I spent here, New Year’s Eve a couple years back, when we stumbled accidentally into Cooper’s to watch the Rolling Stones cover band. That night was so invigorating. Kate and I were so new to everything, the world, apartments, a town, a home, all seemed so far away but necessary. In Cooper’s that night the scene was crowded with people, so young and together and excited about music that it felt like it could have been a scene from any big city in the United States, not some little tiny town up in the Sierra Foothills. It swayed us to move here, we were within throwing distance of San Francisco, Sacramento was there if we needed it. We could continue our road trip somehow with a stop along the way, in the last destination our road trip had taken us: Nevada City.

We stopped in Nevada City in the first place because it was on the way to Auburn, where Kate would settle for a couple of weeks at her parent’s house in time for Thanksgiving. Most campsites had long since closed for the season, and we just saw on the map National Forest campsites along the North Fork of the Yuba River, which meant: open to camp. We spent one night there on the Yuba, and then drove down into Nevada City. I remember reading about the town as we had always done on the trip from our guidebook. It said a lot about how many bookstores there were. How charming the town was. How it was a haven for bohemian artists and poets from the 60’s.

We found it to be pleasant in November. It felt like an island in the trees. I could sense the rest of California around it, which made me happy. We had coffee from the Mekka, walked around the little streets. We got some groceries and went to spend our last night of the trip camping on the shores of the reservoir up Hwy. 20.

That was a sad night. All the moves we knew so well, gathering wood, preparing dinner out in the chilly open air on the campstove. Snuggling up in the back of the truck, getting up to the crisp morning.

We moved here to Nevada City because of that New Year’s Eve. We had been looking for a place to live for a month, unable to pull the trigger on going anywhere it seemed… San Francisco was too expensive and too big. Portland too familiar. Mendocino we had done, and it was the smallness of that place that made us leave in the first place.

Luck made us find a charming little apartment on Deer Creek. Bohemian and old, dirty and cold, but charming all the same. It would be our art studio/recording studio. We would have all kinds of friends our age, they would stop by to visit us since we were right in town. We would find jobs and walk across the bridge to them.

It was so hard though. I spent four months unemployed. How I survived I don’t know. It was depressing. And then I did get a crummy job waiting tables at a mediocre restaurant in town. I couldn’t even eat the greasy food, the tips weren’t that great. There was nothing glamorous about it. Not fine dining, not historical, just a place.

And I didn’t really meet people. We made a few good friends, but there was no getting in with the kids in this town. If you were a stranger here, you were just an outsider. You were mistaken to be here or you were somehow taking advantage of it by existing here. We’d go to a couple parties when Cody would invite us, but all we ever got asked is how we came to be here. From there it didn’t really matter. We weren’t from here.

I finished my album. I met another couple of really good friends, and got a new job at the extremely shoddy local paper. Things could have gone so well. I was ready to make podcasts and write stories and do great design. But any new voices couldn’t be heard at that paper. The “entertainment editor” was severely out of touch with reality, extremely uninspired, and closed off to the real music scene that was happening here. Such a sad waste of talent that place. Kate found a job at the cool hip gallery in town, but it quickly dissolved because of some very strange lack of communication. I hadn’t heard from the guy I had framed photographs for for months… out of the blue he just didn’t call. I still haven’t heard from him. All the promise of this town would go up the roller coaster, and then swoop down terribly.

I coped by taking long drives into the mountains. I missed Mendocino (and still do) terribly. We may not have had many friends, but at least they weren’t even there, anywhere to be found. In Nevada City there were so many people we could know, but the roller coaster always swooped back down.

Things rolled here and there. I recorded with some of the amazing musicians in this town. Truly there is real artistry coming out of this place, be it an after effect of the previous generation, the bonding of small town shared stories, the air, the river, the trees, I don’t know, but it is unique, thoughtful, intelligent, anti cool, refreshing. I know that it is because I play an instrument that is in demand, but that’s fine, I loved the opportunity to create with people.

Aaron Ross and Cody Coyote are so amazingly dear to me. Aaron is the most talented songwriter I have known personally, Cody is sweet, cool, and has such an amazing voice. Alela was kind and courteous for her recording session, Mariee a sweetheart and so modest. Joanna Newsom dancing to the Moore Brothers on a random Saturday night at Cooper’s. Dana kept calling me for recording sessions, hopefully he still will! Dan Elkin, so driven, talented, and passionate. David Torch a humble, incredible person. Jonathan Hischke, truly gifted, Neil Morgan, a person who I felt great affinity for in only 30 minutes of conversation. In other words… such an incredible group of people!

I was able to finish my album here. And when I did, Eric Dickerson helped me really cull it down, and inspired me in the process. I wanted to play. And I have, a little. I got a new job. Things feel better now.

And yet, last night, I just wanted you to know that I am so enamored with you, but feel that I will never truly know you Nevada City. Casual Fog encompasses everything I love about the town, a band of not just really talented people, but a group of some of the nicest people you’ll meet. I want it all to shine, I want something magical to come of this place, but dammit I want to be a part of it somehow. I want to FEEL like I belong.

There are so many blessings, I got to meet, thanks to Laura Brown, Gary Snyder! A life long dream. Just to meet him. And one day I’m up at his table in the house he built while he pours me coffee he brewed. Amazing.

There just is no permanence here. I don’t know what I’m missing. But I either want it all to come together in a hurry or I’ve got to get out. I feel like I’ve been courting you, Nevada City, for two years. And I’m waiting for something to happen, a sign. A glimmer.

I have a good job, I love it in fact. And yet it is not music. I have so many wonderful blessings all around me. I just wanted to write this. A sort of plea for connection. For things to make sense somehow. I want to in writing this snap out of the hazy in between that you’ve held me in. I feel like I’m inside a washing machine, being cleansed, abused, and spun around all at once. I want to either love you or hate you, either way, to take more chances, feel more alive.

So that’s that. I don’t know why exactly I wrote this. I just felt like I needed to. Thank you for everything, thank you for last night, and how beautiful it was. I almost don’t feel like a spectator sometimes in moments like that. People are coming together. They are hopeful and alive. They are creating amazing things. And that’s how it is.

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Nevada City is to be lively tonight, with film fest participants milling about.

And more fun is the show we are putting on downtown, at a new art place called Dragonfly.

Its below Sushi In The Raw and down the street from the Miner’s Foundry and tonight features:

Luke Janela – Instrumentals: Cello, Beats

The Mechanical Kid – Turntables

VJ Bendji – Live Video Production

Dice/Rapaparatus – Beats, Lyrics, Hip Hop

Mariko Amekodommo – Mixed Media

Katherine Unger – Paintings

Twill be a wild and crazy night.

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This Saturday, at the Miner’s Foundry, I will be participating in an event (playing in fact, at the end, as part of a video presentation) that encourages people to see what they can actually do in their lives to positively affect the environment.

Power Palooza

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Things are rolling along so fast. Today is a strange wake up day for me.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts and things going on the line. The CD “Midnight Door” is getting into iTunes as we speak, I’ve made a couple of short videos and am working on more.

Played last Thursday with Aaron Ross and the band at the Miner’s Foundry in Nevada City. The show was incredible, the most fun I’ve had playing music in a long time, and such a great group of musicians.