It’s been a couple months since I’ve published any new entries on the site. I’ve got a few big entries in the works that I’ve yet to sit down and finish. For now, some updates from the last few months.
Over the last months I’ve been spending a lot of time with family and dividing my weeks between my home on the Oregon coast and the new home of my dad and grandmother at the foot of the redwoods just outside of Crescent City, California. I was still a teenager the very first time I traveled up to see the redwoods. Walking in the redwoods and hiking coastal trails in Humboldt County deeply expanded my awareness of the diversity and vastness of nature and life on earth. Over the years I began to take regular trips up north and held a dream of living amongst the great coastal redwoods. My first realization of that dream was in my 20s when I settled on the Oregon coast, where I live just over an hour from the most northern coastal redwood growth outside of Brookings, Oregon. But now, in spending time with family, I also spend time in the redwoods two or three days a week on average – the dream of my late teenage years feels more real than ever before.
It’s been about a year of taking regular trips to Crescent City, exploring the town and neighborhoods in a quest to find a suitable living situation for my family moving up from down south. But along with the time in the city, I’ve been exploring the beaches and trails along the coast, discovering nooks and trails through the redwoods along the Smith River. Throughout the fall, winter and spring I visited the Smith River countless times, and just last weekend, as we turned our cheek toward summer, I finally enjoyed back-to-back days of swimming the Smith.
As I mentioned, my visits to Crescent City have been more about spending quality time with my family and exploring and discovering more of what the surroundings have to offer. I haven’t been so productive when it comes to my creative projects. I might do some editing or mixing, and I’ve been practicing and playing quite a bit down there, including on visits to the Smith, but overall I’ve been saving my music projects for home.
At home, I’ve been working every day in my new home studio space. This has been a project in the works for nearly two years, since an existing structure on our property became unlivable due to serious storm damage. We spent close to a year just working on construction projects, and it would’ve been just over a year ago that the goal to dedicate space to recording first occurred to me. By the time the autumn rains began I had moved the majority of our equipment into the space, where there were still active projects of drywall, painting and attic/roof work to be done. I would spend several months shuffling gear around to accommodate projects, keeping a stripped-down recording space available throughout — the majority of all the demos I’ve recorded since fall 2025 were done in this space.
Yet it wasn’t until about three months ago that I had finally removed all construction materials from the space entirely and had it set up for a live band rehearsal. Even then, it would still be a few weeks until the space was ready for live recording, as I was still putting up sound panels and generally unpacking and organizing gear throughout. There were so many tedious little projects along the way, and I’m still not on the other side of them. In the span of a week I must’ve spent over 20 hours organizing cables — wrapping them, adding velcro cable ties or twist ties, sorting them in piles and then crates, boxes and bags, and finding places for them. I still have a small box with miscellaneous cables that didn’t fall into simple categorization. With all that said, the space is now pretty well set up for recording and rehearsing, and we’ve got a few active projects happening within it. I will get to those across my next couple entries.
My focus for a couple of weeks was a room where I’m setting up an analog work desk — a space for digitizing VHS tapes, playing, recording and reproducing cassette tapes and CDs, and playing back a variety of physical media. I’ve got a couple of boxes of home movies that I’ve been caring for for many years and only now have the space I could dedicate to setting up the equipment for digitizing them. That space is mostly together, but I’ve still got to figure out some solutions for shelving, storage and organization. What was previously a kitchen in this space is now the main working space, with a computer desk, studio monitors, access to our main recording console and so on. This space connects to the large area where we have a drum kit set up, guitar and bass amps, and a vocal booth in the corner of the room.
Next door to the analog room is the space that is still the most in shambles, which I intend to use as a dedicated video space — shooting against a green screen or other backdrops.
While I was still moving around and organizing boxes of records, cassettes and CDs — and trying to figure out some hi-fi humming issues in the setup, opening up a massive can of worms — I received a call from a local musician, Steve Montana. He was looking for some assistance in capturing a video performance of one of his original songs at the request of some documentary filmmakers. He specifically asked if I could do green screen, and I let him know he was in luck, as I’d been setting up a space for doing just that. Although the room was still being used as a transitory space for gear that needed to be sorted out, the one thing that was set up in the space was two walls covered in green fabric. I asked him to give me a week or so to tidy up, and when I did, he came over one afternoon to record Cornfield Blues.
The song was written by him back in the 70s when he was a student at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. It’s a humorous folk song that talks about the school, moving to Iowa, and — among other things — corn. From what I understand, it was an essentially forgotten part of his original catalogue until he was contacted recently by a documentary filmmaker who had just completed a film about the school.
The documentary is called When Maharishi Came to Town and it covers the period in the 70s when Maharishi International University came to Fairfield, Iowa – including the time the Beach Boys came to record their M.I.U. Album at the school. The filmmaker, Dick DeAngelis, spent months trying to track down Steve before they connected and the filmmaker requested a video of Steve performing the song. That’s where I came in.
In the aforementioned unfinished video room I set up lights, two cameras, two microphones, and one DI for the guitar. We probably spent close to an hour dialing in the lighting and camera placement and the audio, and then he did three takes. The last take was the one submitted to the filmmaker. For the green screen background, Steve requested a video of the Oregon coast if possible, and after looking at our options, we found a short video on Pexels that he was happy to use as a simple repeating loop. Within just a couple hours the video was ready, and that was that.
This was a special event because it was the first project I worked on for somebody else in the new studio space. This is something I really want to do more of — making videos and recording for others, other friends and musicians in our coastal community.
You can watch the full video, with the filmmaker describing the background for this song, and Steve’s performance at the end. Note: I tried everything to embed the video on the website but facebook is non cooperative. Link here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/856519317517536
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