More Lovespirals madness including our camping recap, writing and recording new songs, our concert-filled weekend with the Outernational Tour and Melodyguild at Violaine, our Lovespiralsgasms radio show and live chat, the Lovely Ladies of Ryan Lum podcast, Lovespirals on Coverville #474 podcast, playing World of Warcraft, running into Jamie of Closedown, Anji collaborating with The Grooveblaster, and more!

TRANSCRIPT:

Chillin’ with Lovespirals Episode 53 June 15, 2008

Anji: Welcome to Chillin’ with Lovespirals, insights of an indie band.

Ryan: Episode 53 for June 25th, 2008.

Anji: I’m your hostess, Anji Bee.

Ryan: And I’m your host, Ryan Lum.

Anji: And together we’re Lovespirals. All right, had a couple false starts there with the cat running in and screaming.

Ryan: Hey, you shouldn’t tell anyone. They don’t have to know. We can hide that.

Anji: Hey, we’re keeping it real! (Laughs)

Ryan: Good thing we have a door.

Anji: (laughs) Yeah. So we’ve done a lot of stuff since last time we spoke with the fans. I think we might have mentioned that we were going camping.

Ryan: Yeah, I think we did mention it last time and now we have gone camping. (Laughs)

Anji: You may have seen some pictures on Flickr over on AnjiBee.com perhaps.

Ryan: Basically what we did was we went camping to the back side of Catalina Island. Very beautiful, almost kind of primitive camping place. You have to carry everything in or take transportation in six miles on a dirt road. So it’s very cool. People don’t just drive up and walk around.

Anji: Some people drove up.

Ryan: I guess, but barely.

Anji: Only if they already lived on the island.

Ryan: Exactly.

Anji: Then they drove away.

Ryan: and we didn’t see them ever again.

Anji: A bunch of boy scouts bicycled up.

Ryan: Those guys are Iron Man and insane.

Anji: They’re nuts!

Ryan: Six miles there, and it is not a flat six miles. Catalina is basically a mountain rising out of the ocean and it just goes up and down, up and down. There are very few flat parts.

Anji: As my ankles can attest from all the walking we did.

Ryan: But it was cool. A couple years ago at some kind of swap meet or estate sale you bought me a ten dollar guitar.

Anji: I did, at an estate sale.

Ryan: I haven’t had a good use for it. I said maybe I’d bring it camping or something. I can’t really keep it in tune that well, so it’s not good for recording an album.

Anji: I thought you would bring it to the beach.

Ryan: It was perfect for this beach.

Anji: I guess we were on the beach. (Giggles)

Ryan: Yeah, we camped right on the ocean. That was the view right outside our tent. So we wrote a song, had a crappy little cassette recorder from the 80s or 90s and captured the basic ideas. So I can’t wait to get that song happening.

Anji: Yeah. But you’ve been too busy recording other songs lately.

Ryan: I’ve been making a new song which we’re calling “Rain” or maybe “The Rain Song.” I’ve been locked in the studio for two days doing that. So it’s about time to get you in there pretty soon to help me out.

Anji: I heard you in there singing today.

Ryan: It’s a very inspiring song. It makes me even want to sing and I’m not known for being a singer.

Anji: But you do sing some backing vocals on one song on the album.

Ryan: That’s another song I’m still working on, too.

Anji: So we’re four or five songs in. Yeah.

Ryan: This is actually, I counted, the fourth song that I’m hardcore working on in Logic. There are a few more on the back burner like the Catalina one, say. So we have four solid ones in progress and a few others that we’ll start up soon.

Anji: I feel like we kind of wrote a song on the second night too, but I don’t remember anything about that one.

Ryan: I don’t know if we did. We didn’t record it.

Anji: Yeah, there’s no recording.

Ryan: Maybe a variation on the first one or something, but we did a bunch of stuff this weekend.

Anji: And we did a bunch of stuff this weekend. That’s the other thing I was going to talk about. We went to the Hollywood Bowl, which we like to do every summer at least once.

Ryan: At least one time. Our whole deal where we drink the wine in Camrose Park and then we go up to the Bowl and see the show.

Anji: Yeah. This time we brought two friends with us to try something a little different. We had gone with other people when they were going, but this time we brought some folks along to show them how we do it.

Ryan: How we roll.

Anji: I think they were impressed.

Ryan: I think they were very impressed.

Anji: Yeah. (Laughs)

Ryan: It’s a classic time.

Anji: It was great. It was for Thievery Corporation’s “Outer National” tour, so it’s basically them with a million contributing collaborators as the main act and then three supporting acts, one from Argentina, one from Brazil, and, shoot, where was the other one from? I think Argentina, Brazil…

Ryan: Which one was your favorite? Which one were you there mainly for so we can go on.

Anji: I was mainly there for Bebel Gilberto, which, if you listen to The Chillcast with Anji Bee, I already dedicated this week’s show to her. I did a full 45 minutes of Brazilian music because I am a Brazilian music freak.

Ryan: Her music is really good, really cool, sweet, chill Brazilian jazz. She’s more of an old school Brazilian jazz artist, but she’s working with younger collaborators and musicians, so they give it a slightly more modern edge, a little dabs of maybe electronica or something. So it’s cool. I really dug her a lot.

Anji: I wish the rest of the crowd had dug her quite as much. Everyone was talking.

Ryan: I had to turn around and say to the guy behind me. I said, quote: “Are you going to talk through her entire set or just some of it?” And he said, “The whole set.”

Anji: It was exactly like that time at John Mayer.

Ryan: Then I said I paid a lot of money to see this and I’d like to see it, and he made some kind of indication he would chill out and then he was quiet after that.

Anji: It was only one more song anyway. And then Thievery Corporation came on and everyone stood up and started dancing. It was like a switch.

Ryan: It’s like, “Oh, there are some guys behind turntables, let’s suddenly be into it now.”

Anji: “Oh, they’re gonna play records!”

Ryan: But Bebel had some really great musicians. She had two guitarists that were just awesome, just smoking guitarists, and her singing is awesome. The whole band is clicking together.

Anji: They were really great. She was singing her heart out, performing.

Ryan: And the crowd couldn’t give a crap. As soon as these guys come on with the records, everyone shuts up and starts to move their butts.

Anji: Yup. Basically.

Ryan: Oh well, little rant, but we had a good time nonetheless. Almost every show at the Hollywood Bowl is a mix. We have some really good things and moments and there’s always some…

Anji: Wieners. So true.

Ryan: I guess that’s what happens when you get, I don’t know how many people there are, twenty thousand people. You’re going to have some really cool people and you’re going to have some…

Anji: And everyone’s drinking.

Ryan: And you have some dumb drunks. That’s life, that’s how it works out. That was Sunday night, and Lovespirals was crazy this weekend. We went out on two consecutive nights. The night before, Saturday night, we went to Club Violaine, in Los Angeles in Chinatown and checked out my old singer bandmate’s band, Suzanne Perry. Her band Melodyguild played a set. I think it was mainly a release party for their new four song EP out on Projekt Records, ‘Aitu’ is the name of it.

Anji: It just came out this June, so it’s brand new.

Ryan: Yeah. They were cool. I was surprised. They said, “Now we’re going to play a Love Spirals Downwards song.” Oooh!

Anji: I know!

Ryan: So they broke out “Will You Fade” from ‘Ardor.’ So it was kind of cool to see other people playing my song, or our song.

Anji: Yeah, that must have been the first time, huh?

Ryan: I guess so. Not to say no one’s ever covered a Love Spirals Downwards song before but–

Anji: Not in front of you!

Ryan: I was never there at a show watching it, so it was kind of cool.

Anji: I thought Rodney was totally rocking the bassline.

Ryan: Yeah, we gotta get Rodney.

Anji: Rodney looked so great in his little suit and everything. He’s so cool.

Ryan: Rodney, we want you. Rodney Rodriguez, you’re going to be our bandmate. So that was cool! They sounded really good and Suzanne sounded great. She didn’t seem nervous. I know she used to get nervous sometimes. She was very comfortable and happy and I’m happy for them. They looked like they were having a good time and I hope they do some more shows. I didn’t get to ask that; to see if they were going to do more.

Anji: I know it was their first show in years.

Ryan: Yeah, so hopefully they can keep the band, the group of guys, together and do some more.

Anji: I know everyone’s wondering online if they’re going to make an album or not. There were at least two other songs that aren’t on the EP.

Ryan: Street rumor, I was talking to Suzanne. I think she said they’re going to try to complete an album. So for you Melodyguild fans out there, you got it from me first.

Anji: That’s cool. Oh, speaking of Melodyguild, that makes me think of, we’re doing a special set on Auralgasms Radio called “Lovespiralsgasms”.

Ryan: It’s not really on the radio, it’s on the internet.

Anji: It’s called radio.

Ryan: It’s a radio show in the sense that it streams out at a certain time.

Anji: It’s internet radio, babe.

Ryan: It’s not a podcast like this.

Anji: No. It’s internet radio, so it’s ephemeral. It’s going to happen and you have to be there at that moment. So it’s going on this coming Monday, June 30th at 10 p.m. Eastern time. From 10 to 11 you go over to auralgasms.com and you’ll see a big tab Auralgasms Radio. There’s also a chat room. You can play Auralgasms Radio in iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp or even RealAudio, take your choice.

Ryan: Monday the 30th, that’s going to be really soon right after this podcast of ours comes out.

Anji: Really soon, I know, that’s why I had to get this out. And then there’s a chat room, so you and I will be there chatting in the chat room.

Ryan: We will at 11:00 Eastern.

Anji: And I think Jennifer Wilde will also be there. I let her know that I was going to be playing a song from the “Liquid State” album, which also just came out. It’s great, Suzanne’s album came out, Jennifer’s album came out. Neither one of them had made an album in the past decade.

Ryan: So this is cool. Not only can people hear this show, which is kind of like our podcast in the sense you and I are going through and announcing songs, we’re playing those bands you mentioned and some of our songs.

Anji: And a bunch of remixes.

Ryan: And we’ll be there chatting. So this is a big Lovespirals event. So don’t procrastinate because it will happen live and then time will pass and it will be forever gone.

Anji: Exactly especially that chat.

Ryan: Unlike a podcast, this is a timely event, like a live thing. So hope you guys can be there because we will.

Anji: Okay. Oh, and you know what else we’re going to have on the show?

Ryan: What?

Anji: The world premiere of the Michael Plaster remix of “This Truth”. We finally got the final mix from him. So Warren, just so you know, you should probably tune in.

Ryan: He’s a big fan of that as we are.

Anji: He liked that little clip we played. Speaking of which, just really quickly, I’ve gotten most of the “This Truth” final wav files from the remix contest, except from Michael Plaster. He’s kind of holding up the show a little bit. So hopefully we’ll release it digitally this summer.

Ryan: We’ll keep you up on that.

Anji: So there we have it. Inspired by the ephemeral nature of the Auralgasms show, I decided to put together a podcast which you can download, which is similar to, but not the same as, our Auralgasms show. It’s just me talking and I play a slightly different set list and less songs for my old podcast “Lovely Ladies”, which I hadn’t done in over a year, which you can check out at AnjiBee.com. You can hear one track each of Lovespirals, Love Spirals Downwards and all the side projects of the “Lovely Ladies of Ryan Lum,” I call it. Basically you’ve worked with what? four female singers and there’s a song with each of us.

Ryan: So for those of you that cannot make it to Auralgasms, or if you want more after doing the Auralgasms.

Anji: Exactly.

Ryan: And for links to Auralgasms, since it’s a little strange to spell, check our show notes on Lovespirals.com.

Anji: So if you are into podcasts, there’s one more podcast I posted over on Lovespirals.com. The Coverville podcast. Dude! That guy is featured on the front page of podcasts on the iTunes store and he’s got over a hundred comments. I’m like, “Wow, this guy is more of a badass than I even realized!” So Brian finally played our “Welcome to the Machine” cover on Coverville.

Ryan: Pink Floyd.

Anji: Yeah. So now he’s played two of our Pink Floyd covers plus one of our other covers. Anyway, this is our third time, I think, being on Coverville and we’re on Coverville 474 from last week, so check it out.

Ryan: Check it out. So that’s kind of all the big band news of the past couple weeks.

Anji: No, actually I have one more, another big one.

Ryan: Wow, tell me.

Anji: I just found out about this last night, so I’ve been promoting it all day today. There’s this new music site which those of you in the indie music world and interested in indie music will want to check out. It’s called Stereofame.com. This site has a weird twist to it. On the surface it kind of looks like that one I told you guys about recently, TheSixtyOne.com. It’s got a very nice looking interface, easy to use, big buttons and pictures, very easy to use, fun. But the weird thing is as you spend time on the site listening to music and voting for it, and ranking it, and adding it into playlists, you accrue points. I didn’t realize why you would want points until I started looking more closely and I realized that you use the points to bid on things to win them. And some of the prizes are really fricking awesome. You can win iPods, you can win PlayStation 3, which I totally want to win.

Ryan: I bet you need a lot of points for these things.

Anji: You’re bidding against other people, so it all depends. But you accrue points really quickly. We already had like twenty thousand points and I have barely done anything on there. You can win inexpensive things like a ten dollar gift certificate to Starbucks or a twenty five dollar certificate to Guitar Center, all different things. Or you can use the points to win a place on their homepage, which I wanted to try and I actually won. So we’re on the homepage for a day.

Ryan: Cool, awesome.

Anji: So it’s fun. They have a movie soundtrack contest going on, which is –I think– how I first joined the site because I heard about it. There’s a movie coming out called “Dandelion Dust”. It’s based on an independent writer’s novel and they’re looking for music for the soundtrack.

Ryan: Unknown bands, I guess, who are not on J Records and stuff.

Anji: Yeah. I think already one artist has written a song specifically for the movie, but they’re looking for some others. So you can vote for our song “This Truth” or the Pomatic remix of “This Truth” over on Stereofame and I’ve got the link over on Lovespirals.com. I started reading the fine print and it turns out that both we the artist, but not so important, okay, and the people who vote can win tickets to go to the premiere including travel and hotel accommodations. We already live in LA, so it’s not so exciting for us, but the people who vote also get a chance to win.

Ryan: It is cool.

Anji: I think I hear Monster going nuts. Oh well, Monster likes to sneak on the podcast. What can we say?

Ryan: We closed one door and closed the other too. I guess that would be a good suggestion, close two doors.

Anji: What a brat. So anyway, vote for us, Stereofame.com.

Ryan: Yes.

Anji: But it’s not all work around here. We’ve been playing quite a bit lately.

Ryan: At night when we’re a little too tired to work on music or do anything.

Anji: Normally right now we would be doing this.

Ryan: It’s a little early for us right now, but late at night after midnight, you don’t want to go to bed yet. This is a little secret, well not really secret, we just haven’t told you guys yet, but we’ve been playing for about two months now.

Anji: Yeah.

Ryan: A video game. I know it’s old news, we knew about it back in the day, but we waited till now for various reasons.

Anji: It’s so old. We didn’t have enough free time before to do it.

Ryan: Not that we have a plethora right now, but the game is World of Warcraft.

Anji: Old school.

Ryan: We’re old school fans of Blizzard, the guys who make that, because we played Diablo 1, Diablo 2.

Anji: OMG. We were all into Diablo and we got the expansion pack. We’d go online with your friend Dave and do the cow levels.

Ryan: Cow levels. We’re hardcore.

Anji: We played Diablo years after it was even remotely cool.

Ryan: I guess we’re doing the same with Warcraft, but it’s still kinda crowded. There are lots of people out there. So if any of you are World of Warcraft players and can play in our realm, the Echo Isles.

Anji: Yeah.

Ryan: Drop us a line and we’ll go kill some demons together.

Anji: Wait, what’s that thing called, the DM?

Ryan: The DM, yeah. I forgot what the something Mines or something like that.

Anji: Oh, the Deadmines.

Ryan: Yeah, we’ll do DM together.

Anji: We only went through Deadmines once. We each have our parrot.

Ryan: We’re like level 26. So if you’re higher than us, that’d be awesome ’cause we still get killed and stuff.

Anji: We get killed and have to run forever to return our souls to our bodies.

Ryan: But it’s a cool game. I like it.

Anji: It’s totally fun. I knew I was going to get addicted if I started playing and I was afraid.

Ryan: For those who don’t know about the game, you go on instead of playing at home, you play online. That’s why we’re asking people to tell us if they play so we can play with a bunch of people, go around and do stuff. People can be located all over the world and we can kill animals together.

Anji: We don’t have a guild. Some people have tried to court us to join guilds.

Ryan: We don’t really bother. We just go online.

Anji: It’s the two of us. We group up and maybe occasionally we’ll meet up with a few people and group with them to do something that’s like, a little more hardcore.

Ryan: Yeah, we’ll, like, hack things together with someone else once in a while, but it’s usually…

Anji: It’s a little more hardcore. We’re able to get through it most of the time just the two of us. I’m a healer, he’s a fighter.

Ryan: So we just go and hack things and she heals me. It’s pretty cool.

Anji: Pretty much. By the way, I put up three pictures of us today from World of Warcraft.

Ryan: That’s the time when we were killing wolves.

Anji: No, those are on my laptop.

Ryan: Those are funny pictures!

Anji: No, I have to find the one… On my desktop here I had a picture of me at log-in time, then there’s a picture of you in that weird place, not Stormwind, Ironforge. There’s a picture of your in the Ironforge area and then there’s a picture of the two of us going on that fire Maypole. Right now they’re having the Midsummer festival. It’s some weird fire festival and we’re both going around that fire Maypole. It’s kind of a funny picture, so that’s up there. I wish I was playing right now actually.

Ryan: Maybe we’ll play later tonight. I’ve been working on music all day. I’ve got to stop soon, I’m a little tired.

Anji: Yeah. He has been playing music all day long.

Ryan: I was working on the new song.

Anji: He stumbles out and looks really starving. He’s like, “Is there some kind of food, are we going to eat?”

Ryan: Then I go back in.

Anji: (Laughing) And then he goes back in!

Ryan: It’s tough. I wish I could just lay down the whole song live with a band and be done, but it’s not like that.

Anji: Yeah, right. You don’t wish that. You like to do it all yourself.

Ryan: Well, I do it all myself because I don’t have the guys that would do it the way I want it, so I have to do it. If I had guys that I hand picked and they just laid down the bass and the Rhodes right, that’d be great.

Anji: Hey!That reminds me, speaking of musicians, we ran into the guy that you sampled on “Love Survives”.

Ryan: When we saw Melodyguild, yeah, James, Jaime, from the band Closedown. We just sent him off a CD so he can finally hear the drums I used on this.

Anji: Yeah, It’s so funny. No one’s exactly sure where those drums came from, some kind of recording that was over at Rodney’s house, and you heard it somehow and got a copy of it and cut it up and turned it into the drums on “Love Survives”.

Ryan: You got it.

Anji: So there ya have it. What else? That’s more or less it, huh? Only other thing I could mention is that — I don’t know what I’ve been doing all these collaborations, but– I recorded another song with The Grooveblaster.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

Anji: I think I had told them I’d done one, but this is the second song I’ve done with The Grooveblaster for his new album and I kinda have to get on the stick and finish it because he’s gonna wrap up the whole album in the next two weeks.

Ryan: OK. You can step it up.

Anji: So lots of music coming up in the very new future from both myself and Lovespirals.