January 7, 2012

It is hard for me to believe that 2 and 1/2 years have passed since I moved to North Carolina.  I'm living a very different life from that I'd been living in Tokyo for 7 years.  I left the big city with all it has to offer a musician and am now living a very quiet life in the American country side.  There are many good things about my current location, and I am grateful for those things, but an exciting music scene is not one of them.  When I first moved to this area I went out and played at a few different jams and did a handful of gigs with some of the musicians I met.  After a while, I stopped doing even that and have rarely played out in the past year and a half.  It's not that I wouldn't like to but I haven't found a situation that felt right to me.

Fortunately, I have kept fairly busy in my home studio creating and recording accordion and keyboard tracks for a several independent musical artists as well as working on productions of my own songs.  My ongoing work relationship with musician/producer David West brought me a number of tracks to play for 3 artists who record at David's Studio "Z" in Santa Barbara, California, they being Kate Wallace, Annie J. Dahlgren and J. Kahn.  I also provided 2 keyboard tracks for Chinese singing star Beilie and a bunch of accordion tracks for Northern California's Andrew Jon Thomson.

Back in 2008, shortly after moving back to the U.S. from Japan, I played accordion on the song Fe Te Se Le Bre for Candy Chase at Dynamic Tracks studio in Los Angeles.  The song is on her Texas Moon CD which was released last year (2011.)  I love the way the track came out and the accordion sound is really good, thanks to Candy's producer husband Craig Stull and engineer Gary Tharp.

Also in 2011 I spent most of 3 and 1/2 months, day and night, working on a production of one of my original songs.  That's a very long time to work on one song, I know, but it was a very big technical challenge and I wanted the end result to be something I felt good about. Eventually, I reached the point where I felt I couldn't do much better and I liked it.  I sent the song out to people I know in the music business and from that it came to be that a very well known recording artist is planning to record the song for his next CD, which I am very happy about.  The deal is not completely done and I would rather not reveal any more about this until the song has been recorded or is at least in production.  It would be the first time anyone has recorded one of my originals, and this is a well known artist, so I'm pretty excited about it.  I hope to confirm that the song has been recorded and to fill in all the details soon!

Peace and Love,
Al