Pinot Tour Blog #3

Whooooa.. so where did I leave off? I can't remember. But one thing is for sure, we've got a lot of catching up to do.

Monday, July 5th

We had three days off in a row so we decided to drive down to New York City and check out what was going on down there. We stayed at my good friend Josh Itano's apartment in the Bronx, NY. After we parked the van, G, Nick, Troy, and I all took the subway down to Manhattan to check out Times Square. I had never been to NYC and neither had Nick, so we were pretty amped to see everything in person.

We bummed around Times Square for a while, grabbed some food, and headed back up to the Bronx to get some sleep for our recording session the next day.

Tuesday, July 6

So, it's 10:00am on Tuesday morning, we were all up until like 3:30am the night before, I'm the bad guy, waking everyone up.. and I start to realize how difficult it is going to be to get everyone and their gear down to the recording studio in Manhattan. We had set up a session for 12 noon at Skyline Studios, recommended by my former teacher, Peter Erskine, and it takes almost an hour to get from the subway station in the Bronx to where we need to go.

I'm thinking "ok, so we need to walk a mile to Fordham University to get the stuff out of the car, then walk a mile to the subway station with cymbals, snare, kick drum petal, a bass.. , then we need to walk from the subway station to the recording studio.. oh S#&*! It's 10:30 already?"

I figured out that there was no way we were going to make it on time so the only option was to get a cab. Josh, my friend who we were staying with, suggested we get a "gypsy" cab because they're more likely to just give you a flat rate that is usually lower than the yellow cabs in NYC. Sounded pretty sketchy to me, the guy didn't have a meter on the dash or anything, no papers.. they all just drive these lincoln town cars and you just ask them "how much"

Anyway, we made it to the studio just in time and got to work immediately. We recorded a bunch of new material that will be released on our next album.

That's all for now.. I will definitely write more later. Right now we are getting ready to go up to Boulder, CO to hand out some fliers on Pearl St. for our show tomorrow night at The Lazy Dog.