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This is the journal entry from "behind the board"--my experience working on Mirror the Branches, due out sometime this summer.
 
The week before recording Chris and I were on tour in the Midwest. The schedule had us low on sleep, since each college was a decent drive apart, and our afternoons were accounted for with Earth week events, evenings with the concert performances, and mornings we'd venture forth again, dopey and drowsy, crawling into our lovely life: Vita, the veggie van.
It began raining right away- the second day on the road, relentlessly keeping time on the windshield. Our heater is broken, and we had foolishly packed for summer, so it didn't take long for us to get sick. I'd look at my calendar and hear it ticking at me like a clock, and every passing day my sinuses got more inflamed until the small amount of time allotted to sleep was spent focusing on trying to breathe in the stuffy night. My nightmares held all sorts of horrors, including but not limited to: Arriving at the studio, only to find myself suddenly nine months pregnant and having to deliver a child rather than cut the new CD. (Would I really tell my future child that could I have chosen differently, I would?!?); Or, routing to the studio by bus and losing all my teeth in a collision with a grip pole when the driver suddenly braked and tossed me forward into the steel bar. (Don't worry, I insisted on a refunded fare before proceeding, bleeding, to the hospital.)
We picked David Rynhart up at an Irish pub near Cheshire, CT, where he was scribbling in his sketchbook and drinking a pint--a very regular portrait of our dear friend. He'd been on tour 'round New England, sporting his broad brimmed hat and tweed sport coat, carting a guitar and his Irish Flute. He'd done his traveling by bus and train, told us he'd stayed up late for days on end with poets and songwriters, trad players and bus sharing buskers.
I walked dizzily into that dim pub on a bright afternoon, carrying enough goods to stock a natural food shop: vitamin supplements, tissues, tea and tinctures, all recommended by the great Joelle Moushati, our herbalist friend from Boulder, CO. Chris carried, as usual, his older-than-dirt laptop which had, for the hundredth time, broken and was in need of repair. We greeted Rummy (as we call him) and Chris promptly began to dissect his computer into a pile of screws, wires, and hardware, looking like the mad scientist that he is. And me? I began to compile a pile of pills hearty enough to feed the hungry, lining up the bottles like bowling pins on the table. Our waiter approached, immediately irritated, and we had to laugh at ourselves in such a sorry state.
We still had two days before the studio, so we landed ourselves at a Motel 6 near to David's gigs. The time which we'd planned to rehearse could hardly be put to use, since I couldn't complete a song without a sneeze, so we went to work arranging French horn parts instead. (While in Argentina and writing the record I had called Mark Thayer at Signature Studios and asked if he knew a French horn player and upright bass player that we could rope into the session. He replied that he, in fact, knew someone who played both!)
Now, Signature Studios is located in an old barn in Pomfret, CT. This I knew from my investigation on their website. What I didn't know, though I had certainly hoped for, is that the setting is stunningly beautiful. There is a vineyard and quaint, fenced garden on the property, all enclosed by a curtain of wood that protects one's sense of space from the road and not so nearby neighbors. We discovered that the old barn and its adjoining apartments were once home to an artist's collective in the 70s--just my style.
When we pulled in the drive, Vita rumbling and trumpeting our arrival (yes, thank you Vita), I looked around a bit uncertainly- where to knock? A voice called down to welcome us from a top a set of stairs and behind a shadowed screen door.
Mirror the Branches was starting to spin on an old record player somewhere.
  
Still sick, but with above average adrenalin levels, we began tracking that first night. Strange Summer Snow and I'll Turn Myself in on Monday both happened fairly fast. (I chugged enough tea to trigger thirty bladders of bathroom field trips 'tween takes, a disco drip in the leaking sink faucet rushing my relief and sending me bolting back into the booth to try another take. hilarious!)
We very quickly settled into a routine of team work- Christopher cooking meals, David, Mark and I focused on the recording tasks. All hands and ears were well rehearsed, but plenty patient to hear one another's ideas (and there were many many wonderful ones.) Mark's temperament is so relaxed that my stress soon subsided, and I realized that one's job as an engineer must be much more psychologist than tech head!
The second day in Pomfret started off stormy- as though something lovely was brewing. David and I practiced this brooding instrumental piece I imagined would represent transition on the record, (a classical guitar study by Leo Brouwer that I've renamed The Breeze Took Life and Sang) and the sky shook drizzle and morning thunder while we wore sunglasses inside for kicks. Mark was visiting with his downstairs neighbor, and they called up to us from the lawn to take a look at what was breaking through the sky. A beautiful double rainbow that was ending, it seemed, in the garden before us. So, David ate it, naturally, and I grabbed it like a spear, and well, everyone agreed it must be an omen- a good one, that is.
 
We proceeded to track--live being our plan of attack--David and I both playing and singing at the same time, and on a handful of tunes overdubbing subtle things like rhodes or mandolin sparkles. The more time passed at the studio, the more relaxed and efficiently we worked. Sharing meals, sleeping there, waking up early to tiptoe toward the bathroom and hear my songs singing back at me from the control room--Mark was already hard at work! (Ok, yes, and I tend to sleep in later than most....)
On the evening of the third day Rob Jost, aforementioned bassist and French horn player, drove up from New York City and joined us to track Desiree and Jonathan Michaels. We also talked him into adding bass to Strange Summer Snow, which he played so beautifully.
Later that night when buckles clapped and uncapped the French horn from it's case and Rob played a few warm, round sounding notes to Jon Michaels in the control room I nearly DIED, or cried, or both. I literally jumped from the couch like a cheerleader and gave my new friend a large unsolicited hug. His parts give the record just the somber, and sea faring feel I had hoped for.
  
Quite ahead of schedule and with only one (planned for) song left to track, we began our fourth morning at Signature with confidence, and ok, a little hype. At the suggestion of Mark (He'd heard it during a rehearsal) we decided to add House Carpenter to the record. House Carpenter is the first song I can remember my mother teaching me. We were up round a Colorado campfire, I the barefoot child of hippies, and my mother and friend singing it in the smoke and stars. I asked her to teach it to me, and I used to cry every time we neared the sad ending. Anyhow, it's an interesting full circle feeling to have tracked it on my fourth studio record, ten years after learning it.
Truth be told, we had to twist David' arm into playing the part of the devil, yet again...but we finally convinced him after Mark mentioned the idea of adding (gasp) an electric guitar solo. It's really lovely to have David singing lead on something on the CD, and his voice sounds just gorgeous. After recording the basics for that 7 minute old English folk ballad, we then proceeded to overdubs.
  
Overdubs are always my favorite part--watching, or hearing, your children turn into adults!!! Fully realized ideas, with a sense of personality and fashion taking shape. David was absolutely brilliant and breezy in his execution of his creative ideas, and Mark had so many wonderful suggestions to broaden the soundscape. Glockenspiel stars on Midnight Molasses, rolling thunder from a ceiling panel on House Carpenter. (My credits will read like this on the record: Gabrielle Louise -Songwriting, Voice, Guitar, Rolling Thunder.)
Once our work was done we had enough time left to beer and booze ourselves into goofiness. We made a series of music videos, from serious to extremely silly, that really captured our time at Signature Studios. We sabotaged Tom Waits' tunes, crooned Use Your Teeth, Pure Adrenalin, and Quantum Genius to a chicken perched on the piano, and eventually filmed some very moody one mic vids of I'll Turn Myself in on Monday, Pirates of Mental Space and Midnight Molasses a la Welch/Rawlings. This week I discovered a poem that I love. It reminds me of all these late night sing-a-longs that keep me alive and full of joy.
Everyone suddenly burst out singing,
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
...Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; -on - on - and out
of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears, and horror
drifted away...O, but everyone
was a bird; and the song was wordless,
the singing will never be done.
-Siegfried Loraine Sassoon 1919
  
We took about a week off of the project, dropping David off at a bus station in Hartford, CT, where he began this month's cross country journey. Chris and I went up to New Hampshire, where my grandmother Isobel maintains a beautiful blueberry farm. We spent the week recuperating in her colonial farm house, reading WWI poetry and having many a wonderful meal, chalk full of conversation and candlelight.
Now we're onto mixing, after a good day of cleaning house and tidying the tunes for clicks, pops, crackles, and a "garden variety" of cereal box nuisances. I'm finding that I have to live with a lot of imperfections--it's the nature of cutting a record in this style--you maintain the emotion but have to accept an out of tune note now and again. I try to remember Cohen, who wrote it so well...
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Overall, I'm just bursting with excitement about releasing the record, when that time comes. We have mastering, artwork, and printing yet ahead, so maybe midsummer? We’ll see…
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