A Day For Percussion May 16, 2009

Today, Rob is going to our friend Javier’s house to record some percussion for our song “Time Machine #13”.

We love Javier. He’s an awesome guy and an amazing drummer. He’s got lots of degrees (bachelor & master’s) in drumming, and he has worked as a professional drummer for years and years now. Currently, he is the drummer for The Annie Moses Band, and they travel a whole lot. So it is very nice that he is in town right when we need some percussion parts recorded.

Javier has a house in East Nashville, and Rob just packs up his recording gear and takes it over there. No one disturbs them and they don’t bother anyone else. It’s great!

Javi is an amazingly versatile drummer, and you should check out jazz combo, the JJ Saint James Band.  The singer is another friend of ours, Aynsley McLean.  She recorded one of Rob’s songs on her lovely lullaby album, and you can hear some of it here.   Look for the song Sweet Dreams.

Don’t they sound awesome?  It’s so inspiring to be surrounded by so many talented friends. We’ll be writing about more of them soon.

(P.S.  You can hire the JJ Saint James Band for events if you want to impress your guests with awesome music.)

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Singing Of Brightness And Beauty May 14, 2009

I love to read great books, don’t you?  

I started reading when I was four years old, and I have been captivated ever since.  I especially love fiction, with Russian, British and Southern Gothic literature being among my favorites.  

Rob loves poetry, especially William Blake, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney and John Updike.  And we are both head over heels in love with the American poet Billy Collins.  (In fact, he is speaking at a writer’s seminar at a local university next month, and we are trying our best to figure out a way to go.)

So inspiration from books has been always present.  Here’s a quote from one of my favorite books, Cancer Ward, by one of my favorite authors, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.  

“Her smile was kind, not so much her smile as the lips themselves. They were vital separate lips, which seemed about to flutter from her face like a lark into the sky. They were made, as all lips are, for kissing, yet they had other more important work to do: to sing of brightness and beauty.” 

When I read that years ago in my bed late at night, I had to get up and write it down so I would not forget how important this work of singing really is.  

I think it might be possible to bring brightness and beauty to the world with a song, and if it is possible, I want to do it.

The Birth Of A Band

Hello internets!  

We are The Lovespies, a husband and wife duo from Nashville, Tennessee who try to make pretty music.  Our names are Rob and Julie, and we’ve just mixed the final recording of our very first song.  We are currently working on recording more songs, booking shows, creating a website, joining Twitter and all those other things that smart musicians do in the 21st century.

In this blog, we will try to give you a little window into our world of music.  We hope to talk about the following:   

• starting a band
• writing songs
• arranging and recording those songs, including some techie stuff
• what inspires us
• playing live shows
• selling tons of records
• getting songs played in movies and television shows
• making a living on the money you get from playing music
• touring around the country in a posh tour bus
• winning Oscars and Grammys
• retiring to our private island with all our royalties

Ok, so maybe we won’t talk about ALL of those things.  But you never know….   We will go where the music takes us, and we’d love for you to come along and dream with us.  Tell us what you’d like to hear about.  Any questions or suggested topics?

We do think it is fair to warn you of all possible outcomes, though.  We really don’t plan on making shabby music, and we know real people who have had their songs in movies, sold lots of records and have lived on their royalties.  Granted, none of them have retired to a private island, but we were just joking about that part.  

The posh tour bus, though?  We’d like ours in a silvery-purple.