An Acoustic Video of Pure Joy

August 4th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Videos | 2 Comments »

First, thank you to everyone that has checked out the new songs on Bbelief. The response since last week has been terrific, and I truly appreciate the kind words from everyone. The amount of work that goes into such a small output is enormous. “Bbelief” is only ~16 minutes long, but is the product of a few years of ideas trickling through my mind, and endless hours of practicing, writing and recording. So it is always rewarding to hear that the final results of my labors are enjoyed by others. I hope these songs inspire you and excite you as they do me…

Write a Review
If you are really enjoying the new music, I would encourage you to write a review of it on iTunes. It’s really simple: click this link to open up iTunes, and then click on the “Write a Review” link below the album cover image…Positive reviews can help the tracks gain visibility in iTunes, so all would help!

Pure Joy Acoustic Video Below
On another note, I wanted to begin the first of hopefully many video performance posts. The video below is a solo acoustic performance of me playing Pure Joy. It may sound very simple compared to the final recordings, but it will show you what a song looks like in its essential form - just the basic chords and voice. The final studio recording on Bbelief has about 30 different parts for violin, viola, cello, bass, Rhodes keyboard, two electric guitars, bass guitar, and drums…So you can get a sense of the amount of orchestration that takes place between the time when a song is “written,” and when it is ready for recording…

Please let me know what you think in the comments section! I apologize in advance for the poor video /audio quality. I’m still working on figuring that out…

Those of you reading this post in email or RSS will have to click here to view the video.

“Bbelief” Music Finally Available for Download!

July 30th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Bbelief | No Comments »

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Introducing:

New music by Brian Bourque

Performed by The B-Flat Project

Now Available for Download
(click iTunes button below)

Also available here:

Rhapsody

Napster

eMusic

Amazon MP3

Lala

Shockhound

One of my best “gigs” ever…

July 28th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in live music | 1 Comment »

Having covered my worst gig ever, I’d like to mention a few of the best performances I’ve ever been part of. While they were far from the most polished or musically elaborate, my top two favorites were both incredible experiences. Here I will summarize one, and leave the other for a post in the near future…

A Jewelry Shop in Shanghai

As many of you know, I help Theresa Wing Hines run her jewelry company, One Pearl. One of the perks of the job is our occasional travels to Asia, to meet with suppliers, check out new merchandise and have fun. One of our favorite stops is Shanghai, where we visit one of our best suppliers, who has also become a good friend to us. She employs and houses several young girls, who help with the jewelry production. (Don’t worry, it is definitely NOT a sweatshop!).

While traveling in November 2006, I brought my cheap classical guitar along for noodling in the hotel room. After a few days of dealing with jewelry, I was encouraged to bring my guitar to the jewelry shop and play some music for everyone. And I did. It was quite a scene.

I have no idea what the girls were thinking, and I’m pretty sure they couldn’t understand any of the lyrics. But it was great. Theresa was smiling wide and I was laughing occasionally at the absurdity and purity of the event. Of the many places I could see myself playing, I had not imagined one of them being a jewelry store in Shanghai.

Afterwards, we all took pictures together, and the girls blushed in their cute ways. I think one of them even cried, though we weren’t sure why…and I gave them copies of my CD.

It was such a special experience because it was a strange and brief intermingling of different worlds. Our lives are so different - the languages we speak, the food we eat, the places we’ll see and the paths we’ll take, but we all shared the joy in the store that day.

My Worst Gig Ever!

July 21st, 2008 by Brian | Posted in live music | No Comments »

Musicians talk of “paying your dues,” meaning most of us have had to play some lame gigs. My worst gig by far was a performance I gave in an empty Collinsville parking lot in the summer of 2006. A music store decided to have some live music out front to celebrate the Saturday summer sun, and a friend told me I should call them up and arrange to play for an hour, which I did.

A Parking Lot of Adoring Asphalt and Empty Cars
I showed up around 4pm, and my skepticism grew as I observed the small PA system and lonely microphone facing out onto a largely abandoned parking lot. The stage was a small wooden stairway leading into the store. Channeling gratitude for the chance to play my music, I mustered the courage to go through my setlist. Occasionally a person would walk by on their way to or from a car or nearby shop. The absence of humans was a relief in a way. I was afraid that someone I knew might see me playing music to nobody in a sun-blistered parking lot. When it was over, I reflected that the experience had been a good character builder. It was entirely uncomfortable and unenjoyable, but I had done it anyways. A victory for the psyche. I hoped that, by submitting to such a horrifying experience, I would reap karmic benefits in the future.

Since no one was there to memorialize the gig in photographic form, I’ve assembled some artistic renderings of the parking lot gig below. The first one is perhaps a reasonable representation of what it looked like. The second, what it felt like!

Putting Sight to Sounds - Bethany Schlegel

July 16th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Bbelief, Square One | No Comments »

In the old days of physical albums with multi-page inserts, there was room for all sorts of artistic indulgence in graphics and design. But the shift to digital has meant whittling down the visual art to essentially a cover. For Bbelief, we aren’t even printing physical CDs at this point, so the only chances to personalize the music visually comes in the cover art sent to places like iTunes, and on this website.

Bethany Schlegel, Graphic Designer Extraordinaire

For my graphic art needs, I’ve consisted relied on Bethany Schlegel to come up with striking and original designs that do great justice to my music and ideas. She’s an old friend from childhood…I think we attended school together from kindergarten through high school. When I was working on my first B-Flat Project release, Square One, I got in touch with her and she agreed to do the album art. The cover, which you see below, incorporates the B-Flat logo nicely with the idea of squares…

Since then she’s designed the humorously wonderful logo to one of my other websites, The Music Snob, and basically designed the current ecommerce site for the near and dear One Pearl jewelry company.

Settling on the Final Bbelief Cover

I called upon her again for the Bbelief cover. While I’ll wait til a later post to get into the meaning of the EP’s title and the visual art that accompanies it, first a few words about the process of arriving at the present art. The music recordings were finally finished in April, but it took nearly three months beyond that for us to settle on cover art. Bethany did a great job of tolerating my fickleness and followed me down several tangents. She turned out many drafts of ideas that I would then decide were not the right direction, and would never (to me, anyways) show that she was losing her patience!

Below are some of the ideas that we chose not to use. In case it’s not clear, the art we finally chose is what you see in the header banner of this blog, slightly modified. Later on I’ll get into its significance…

To check out Bethany’s blog and send her lots of design work, go here: Bethany’s blog

Sting, Dire Straits, David Bowie, Madonna…

July 14th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Bbelief, recording | 1 Comment »

Question: What do these famous artists have in common with The B-Flat Project?!

Answer: Drum legend Omar Hakim.

Who is Omar Hakim?

Omar is one of the best drummers on the planet, period. He began playing drums professionally at the young age of 15, in Patti Labelle’s band. He was Sting’s first drummer when Sting went solo. He played on David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance Tonight,” and has gigged or recorded with just about everyone else. And now, that list includes recording with The B-Flat Project on Bbelief.

It was a huge stroke of luck and fortune that brought about this incredible chance to record with Omar. Bbelief was scheduled to begin recording last September at Monster Island Studios in Manhattan. At the last minute we needed to replace our drummer, and studio owner Mike Caffrey assured me that he could get an incredible player for the session. Well, he did not let us down.

The Session

Omar arrived with his supply of snare drums and other weapons in tow. I’d never even played with a drummer that had a variety of snares, or was conscientious enough to choose which to use on a song-by-song basis. The drum fanatics among you might hear on Bbelief that he even switches between two different snares on Devil Song. His ability to produce polished drum tracks upon immediately hearing our songs was incredible, and one of the reasons why he’s so in demand. Karl the bass player and I played through each song once, and Omar listened and took notes. We played back the recording of this rough take, discuss the song structure, dynamics and mood, and then recorded a take with Omar playing with us. While singing and playing guitar, I would call out certain changes or shifts to Omar, and he would ride with them seamlessly. His intuition of build and character, and the way he personalized the individual sections of each songs, was genius.

The Results - Wow.

When you hear Bbelief for yourselves, I think you will agree that the drums add SO much to the songs, and do an incredible job of driving along each of the moods and shifts in the pieces. The recording session itself was pretty stressful for me, because here I was throwing a ton of money into one day of recording with a drummer that had never heard the songs. Since I was so used to hearing the songs played one way, to hear them with Omar playing them was a whole new experience. It took a leap of faith to assume that, even though the takes were sounding different, they were in fact going to be totally appropriate for the songs. Weeks after this initial tracking session, I was still listening to the recordings and marvelling at how much Omar’s parts added to the songs, in ways that I hadn’t even thought about. His playing nailed down such beautiful moods and grooves, and heightened the innate qualities of the songs I’d written.

When you listen to these songs, keep in mind that of the three “songs” (Pure Joy, You and I, Devil Song), two of the three were 1st takes, meaning we played through/recorded them once and kept that version. The other song (I think it was Pure Joy), was a second take. Incredible.

Below is a fun and incredible video of Omar playing Radio City with Sting in 1986. The real badass drumming happens around 3:00, but watch the whole thing. It’s pretty incredible. And to think that he’s had twenty-two years since then to get even better.

Digging in the Dirt

July 11th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in composition | No Comments »

I’ve come to look at the creative process as akin to digging in the dirt. There are rich things in the soil, but each person has a different patch of dirt, and the relative scarcity of valuable minerals and metals varies. Someone like Elton John, perhaps, has to dig for no more than an hour to find something he likes and shape it into an entire song. Others spend years sifting through the mud, and only once, or never at all, find their golden song. For me, digging for musical ideas is a long and arduous process. I pull up all sorts of junk, scraps, bones, garbage. Every once in a while something shiny rises to the surface. And even then, I may decide after a while that it’s not the real thing.

Almost all of my songs have originated as musical ideas, usually some chords or a riff on a guitar. Rarely, if ever, have I written lyrics first and then tried to set it to music. Lyrics are typically the last thing that bubble up. The best moments are the ones when the primitive essence of a song appears through whatever nonsense or scratchwork I’m playing. Something clicks and I hear much more than the little melodic phrase or rhythmic suggestion that caught my attention. The whole mood of the song will sometimes reveal itself in violent nonsense. I will become captive to the idea, and sing along with gibberish words that reflect the idea’s energy.

A Pile of Nonsense

One of my favorite song ideas remains a simple recording of me making up words as I play through something on a piano for the first couple times. I still listen to the gibberish recording and hope that someday I will write words that express the mood better than that nonsense already does. I’ve debated whether that’s even possible, or whether I should just try to memorize the nonsense and sing it exactly as it came out. Part of me thinks this would just be laziness, but another part thinks that it already sounds exactly as it should be, and that the song’s spirit doesn’t need real words to convey itself fully. In a way, the lack of real words makes it easier to appreciate the song’s wistful longing.

Preview of Bbelief

July 10th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Bbelief | 2 Comments »

Here are some delicious clips from two of the tracks on Bbelief. They are the first choruses of each song, so you can get a sense of each song’s point of return / departure.

MP3 Previews:

Pure Joy

You and I

Let me know what you think…

Seun Kuti

July 8th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in live music | No Comments »

On Sunday we were hoping to repeat Saturday’s good fortune and headed to Central Park’s Summerstage for the 2nd day in a row. We tried to catch Seun Kuti and Egypt 80; a roaring, funky afrobeat band from Nigeria that I heard for the first time at last year’s Montreal Jazz Festival. Unfortunately the line was way too long and we couldn’t get in. But we did listen to the whole set from the shaded area behind the bleachers. We were able to dance and enjoy the music, and were far from the only ones with the same idea.

Where’s the new music?

July 7th, 2008 by Brian | Posted in Bbelief | No Comments »

To answer the question, the music and cover are FINALLY done and now they will be put in queue for loading in iTunes, which can take 1-2 months. In the meantime, we will share some of the stories behind the songs, some video footage of this and that, and other miscellanea.

The four tracks on the short but rich upcoming release, Bbelief, were finished in April. Since then, we’ve been struggling to find a visual concept that worked well with the songs. Many ideas were tried, but none seemed to really fit. But finally we have a cover. Sadly enough, the cover won’t even be printed, since most sales these days are digital and we can’t really justify the expense right now of printing physical CDs.

Here’s a bizarre and interesting image culled from the same source as the eventual cover image: